Gustave Flaubert Quotes

There is no truth. There is only perception.

I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports.... When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!

Read in order to live.

For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.

For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.