Exuberance is better than taste.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTExuberance is better than taste.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTDo not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTPleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTThere is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTThe deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTNothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTWhat seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTTravel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTOn certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTIt’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTMy foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTThe future is the worst thing about the present.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTI spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTThe principal thing in this world is to keep one’s soul aloft.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTShe wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTThe public wants work which flatters its illusions.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT