Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands. - Gustave Flaubert
My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real. - Gustave Flaubert
Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins. - Gustave Flaubert
A child of my own! Oh, no, no, no! Let my flesh perish with me, and let me not transmit to anyone the boredom and ignominiousness of life. - Gustave Flaubert
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. - Gustave Flaubert
It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them. - Gustave Flaubert
Sadness is a vice. - Gustave Flaubert
Be regular and orderly in your life, that you may be violent and original in your work. - Gustave Flaubert
Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expected to find it. - Gustave Flaubert
Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation. - Gustave Flaubert
That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust. - Gustave Flaubert
You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word. - Gustave Flaubert
The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel. - Gustave Flaubert
God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world - Gustave Flaubert
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy. - Gustave Flaubert
Perfection is the enemy of the good. - Gustave Flaubert
People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along. - Gustave Flaubert
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. - Gustave Flaubert
For none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars. - Gustave Flaubert
He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides - Gustave Flaubert
Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams? - Gustave Flaubert
I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world - Gustave Flaubert
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. - Gustave Flaubert
What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write. - Gustave Flaubert
How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis. - Gustave Flaubert
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within. - Gustave Flaubert
I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop. - Gustave Flaubert
Comme l'on serait savant si l'on connaissait bien seulement cinq à six livres. ( How wise one might be if one knew thoroughly only some half of a dozen books - Gustave Flaubert
A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man. - Gustave Flaubert
Language is like a crack'd kettle on which we beat out tunes to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity. - Gustave Flaubert
There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me - Gustave Flaubert
Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living. - Gustave Flaubert
You don’t make art out of good intentions. - Gustave Flaubert
Ellos, los escritores, eran pródigos como reyes y estaban llenos de ideales ambiciosos y fantásticos delirios. Era una existencia entre el cielo y la tierra, metida en las tormentas, algo sublime - Gustave Flaubert
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie. - Gustave Flaubert
Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this. - Gustave Flaubert
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live. - Gustave Flaubert
Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work. - Gustave Flaubert
We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means. - Gustave Flaubert
Travel, leave everything, copy the birds. The home is one of civilization’s sadnesses. - Gustave Flaubert
Human speech is a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars. - Gustave Flaubert
Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work. - Gustave Flaubert
In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up. - Gustave Flaubert
Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitterness. - Gustave Flaubert
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels. - Gustave Flaubert
I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room - Gustave Flaubert
The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed. - Gustave Flaubert
Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire? - Gustave Flaubert
Language is like a crack'd kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity. - Gustave Flaubert
When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women - Gustave Flaubert
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois. - Gustave Flaubert
One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table. - Gustave Flaubert
The public wants work which flatters its illusions. - Gustave Flaubert
By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream - Gustave Flaubert
But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men. - Gustave Flaubert
If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim. - Gustave Flaubert
Aquela putain, Emma Bovary, tem a vida eterna e eu morro como um cão. - Gustave Flaubert
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it - Gustave Flaubert
The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars. - Gustave Flaubert
I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker’s head if they’re not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it’s bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God’s face when it’s bitter - Gustave Flaubert