Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.

One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

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

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

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

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.

Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity.

The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft.

Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.