“When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
“Everyone rushes wherever his instincts impel him, the populace swarms like insects over a corpse, poets pass by without having the time… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
“Oh, if somewhere there were a being strong and handsome, a valiant heart, passionate and sensitive at once, a poet's spirit in… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry. — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
“With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
“The day before yesterday, in the woods of Touques, in a charming spot beside a spring, I found old cigar butts and… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
“[H]e was soon to be head clerk; it was time to settle down. So he gave up his flute, exalted sentiments, and… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family. — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous. — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
“She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books. — 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
