Gustave Flaubert Quotes
I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity. I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key. I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none. I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly. It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs. Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force. Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity. Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying. Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings. Madame Bovary is myself. Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in. Of all lies, art is the least untrue. Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others. Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution. One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness. One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels. One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes. One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form. One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness. One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
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