One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
Gustave Flaubert

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

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert

Read much, but not many books.
Gustave Flaubert

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

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
Gustave Flaubert

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
Gustave Flaubert

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
Gustave Flaubert

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Gustave Flaubert

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
Gustave Flaubert

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
Gustave Flaubert

The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.
Gustave Flaubert

The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.
Gustave Flaubert

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
Gustave Flaubert

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
Gustave Flaubert

The future is the worst thing about the present.
Gustave Flaubert

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
Gustave Flaubert

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
Gustave Flaubert

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
Gustave Flaubert

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
Gustave Flaubert