Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. – Gustave Flaubert
Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution. – Gustave Flaubert
All ones inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry. – Gustave Flaubert
There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things. – Gustave Flaubert