Top 71 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

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

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

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.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.