Gustave Flaubert

“Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.”

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

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

“I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.”

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

“One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.”

“Madame Bovary is myself.”

“Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.”

“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.”

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

“I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.”

“Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.”

“The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.”

“I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.”

“Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.”

“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.”

“Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.”

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

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

“One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!”