I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments. — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
Ah! In fact there are two moralities ... The petty one, the conventional one, the one devised by men, that keeps changing… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
“The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.” — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid. — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
“When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings. — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
“But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows,… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man. — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel. — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image