Gustave Flaubert - Art Quotes

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Don't talk to me about your hideous reality! What does it mean — reality? Some see things black, others blue — the multitude sees them brute-fashion. There is nothing less natural than Michael Angelo; there is nothing more powerful! The anxiety about eternal truth is a mark of contemporary baseness; and art will become, if things go on in that way, a sort of poor joke as much below religion as it is below poetry, and as much below politics as it is below business. You will never reach its end — yes, its end! — which is to cause within us an impersonal exaltation, with petty works, in spite of all your finished execution.

Gustave Flaubert
What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

Gustave Flaubert
You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

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

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

Gustave Flaubert
On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

Gustave Flaubert
Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

Gustave Flaubert
Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly: ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling, than to conjure away the burden and bitterness.

Gustave Flaubert
The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in Art and count all the rest as nothing. One's pride, if it is well founded, makes up for everything else.

Gustave Flaubert