"Reveal art; conceal the artist."
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Quote collection
Gustave Flaubert quotes (page 13 of 15)
299 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea--of an ideal."
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"In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up."
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"Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?"
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"Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it."
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"What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it."
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"It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes."
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"[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight."
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"But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human."
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"Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you."
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"The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art."
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"I have patience in all things - as far as the antechamber."
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"The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft."
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"Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings."
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"What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love."
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"Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence."
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"There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces."
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"Remembering the ball became for Emma a daily occupation. Every time Wednesday came round, she told herself when she woke up: 'Ah! One week ago...two weeks ago...three weeks ago, I was there!' And, little by little, in her memory, the faces all blurred together; she forgot the tunes of the quadrilles; no longer could she so clearly picture the liveries and the rooms; some details disappeared, but the yearning remained."
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"Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again."
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"I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper."
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