Gustave Flaubert

“Of all lies, art is the least untrue.”

“As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.”

“It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.”

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

“Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom”

“She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.”

“I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.”

“The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.”

“Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level”

“There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more”

“I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.”

“The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.”

“Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.”

“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it”

“You don’t make art out of good intentions.”

“ראוי היה שכל סופר יקרא על אודותיו קודם שהוא כותב ואחר שהוא כותב ואז לא היה שום ספר שומם.”

“נלחם הוא בעקשנות עם האידיאה, עם המילה; הוא קושרן, הוא מרתכן, כובלן בכוח רצונו כדרך שכולאים חיית-בר בכלוב.”

“הוא לא יגיע אל בן־שיחו באמצעות דיבור פשוט. כדי לחזור על המלים 'סבל', 'אהבה' אין די — עליו להשמיעם; אין לו סיכוי לשכנע אחרים, אלא אם הוא מציג את תשוקתו אליהם בכל ערייתה, בדיוק כפי שהוא חי אותה. במלים אחרות, פאתוס יתגלה באמצעות קול ומחווה ובתוכם, ללא זכות, ללא סמכות; הוא יכול רק לצטט את מצבו.”

“חש את אי שביעות הרצון שחשים אלו שאינם חולמים על דבר מעבר למה שיש להם.”

“אני מתעבת גיבורים בינוניים ורגשות ממוצעים, כפי שיש בחיים.”