Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying. – Gustave Flaubert
The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet. – 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
The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it. – Gustave Flaubert
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe. – Gustave Flaubert
Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness nothing but faith, faith and freedom. – Gustave Flaubert
You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it. – 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
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. – Gustave Flaubert
Of all lies, art is the least untrue. – Gustave Flaubert
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key. – 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
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. – Gustave Flaubert
Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins. – Gustave Flaubert
There is no truth. There is only perception. – Gustave Flaubert
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. – Gustave Flaubert
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. – Gustave Flaubert
The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded. – Gustave Flaubert
