694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Poetry is as exact a science as geometry

It seems to me... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.

On spinach: I dislike it, and am happy to dislike it because if I liked it I would eat it, and I cannot stand it.

I maintain that ideas are events. It is more difficult to make them interesting, I know, but if you fail the style is at fault.

What is glory? It is to have a lot of nonsense talked about you.

Happy are they who don't doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page. I myself hesitate, I falter, I become angry and fearful, my drive diminishes as my taste improves, and I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well-proportioned paragraph.

If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed!

. . . human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.