Gustave Flaubert Quote

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was...

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never s...

Ma che importanza aveva! Non era felice, non lo era mai stata. Da dove veniva, dunque, quella insufficienza di vita, quella istantanea marcescenza delle cose a cui si appoggiava?… Ma se da qualche par...

Desiderava al tempo stesso morire e vivere a Parigi.

It seems that the people of Oran are like that friend of Flaubert who, on the point of death, casting a last glance at the irreplaceable earth, exclaimed: Close the window, it's too beautiful.

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

He got carried away as he developed his idea: 'The aesthetic quality of towns is essential. If, as has been said, every landscape is a frame of mind, then it is even more true of a townscape. The way...