Gustave Flaubert

"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost."

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

"The public wants work which flatters its illusions."

"When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women"

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

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

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

"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."

"There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it"

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

"I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within."

"We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means."

"Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work."

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

"One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels."

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

"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."

"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."

"There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it"

"You don’t make art out of good intentions."