“The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.”
Diet
“Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.”
HappinessAll Quotes by Gustave Flaubert
“The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.”
Art“I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.”
Work“Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness nothing but faith, faith and freedom.”
Art“One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.”
Hope“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.”
Art“Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.”
History“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Work“There is no truth. There is only perception.”
Truth“The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.”
Work“Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.”
Nature“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”
Art“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
Music“Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.”
Poetry“All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.”
Poetry“Of all lies, art is the least untrue.”
Art“Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.”
Education“I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.”
Alone“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.”
Art“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.”
Age