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.

One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.

Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times.

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars.

Perfection is the enemy of the good.

Human speech is a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars.

For none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and 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.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

A child of my own! Oh, no, no, no! Let my flesh perish with me, and let me not transmit to anyone the boredom and ignominiousness of life.

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

a request for money is the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.

Madame Bovary, c’est moi.

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Books are made not like children but like pyramids … and they’re just as useless! and they stay in the desert! … Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.

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.

Be regular and orderly like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

The less one feels a thing, the more likely one is to express it as it really is.

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

Yvetot [a small town in the north of France] is as good as Constantinople.