10 Gustave Flaubert Quotes on Art

Gustave Flaubert quotes on art

1. One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.

3. One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.

4. An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

7. Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

8. 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.

11. Exuberance is better than taste:

16. What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

21. 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.

36. 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

92. Of all lies, art is the least untrue.