Gustave Flaubert

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

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.

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

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

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

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

There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.