Artist Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

— Gustave Flaubert

Reveal art; conceal the artist.

— Gustave Flaubert

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

— Gustave Flaubert

Art is nothing without form.

— Gustave Flaubert

“Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue.”

— Gustave Flaubert

Everything is there: the love of Art.

— Gustave Flaubert

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

— Gustave Flaubert

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

“The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.”

— Gustave Flaubert

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

— 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

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

— Gustave Flaubert

“The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.”

— Gustave Flaubert

Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.

— Gustave Flaubert

There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an…

— Gustave Flaubert

The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail,…

— Gustave Flaubert

Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion,…

— Gustave Flaubert

The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more…

— 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…

— Gustave Flaubert

“I refuse to consider Art a drain-pipe for passion, a kind of chamberpot, a slightly more elegant substitute for gossip and confidences.…

— Gustave Flaubert

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or…

— Gustave Flaubert

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when…

— Gustave Flaubert

There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with…

— Gustave Flaubert

“If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy,…

— 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…

— Gustave Flaubert

[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the…

— Gustave Flaubert

What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by…

— Gustave Flaubert

I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in…

— Gustave Flaubert

“The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.”

— Gustave Flaubert

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

— Gustave Flaubert

“Pellerin used to read every available book on aesthetics, in the hope of discovering the true theory of Beauty, for he was…

— Gustave Flaubert

Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is…

— Gustave Flaubert