Gustave Flaubert Quotes on Art
-
One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.
-
One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.
-
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
-
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
-
The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
-
Exuberance is better than taste:
-
What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
-
The sentimental songs she sang in music class were all about little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagoons, gondoliers -- mawkish compositions that allowed her to glimpse, through the silliness of the words and the indiscretions of the music, the alluring, phantasmagoric realm of genuine feeling.
-
In the tragedy in question, for example, he condemned the ideas but admired the style, abhorred the conception but praised all the details, found the characters impossible but their speeches marvelous
-
Of all lies, art is the least untrue.