Top 71 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

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

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.