This is the second of four meditations on the letters of Gustave Flaubert, accompanied by a selection of his thoughts. The selection is repeated with each missive.

Gratuitous writing, face it, is a weird activity. To inform, instruct, inspire, sure. To sell, yes, as a baker sells pies. But for oneself? Some improbable eventual reader? To populate with soulmates the solitude writing requires? To passionately perfect a phrase that may never be read?

Some argue immortality’s the writer’s carrot: ars longa, vita brevis. Maybe, if you squint hard. But how many Homers survive for millennia? Emily Dickinson, who wrote stuff worth saving, directed her trunk of poems be deep-sixed – a deathbed request ignored, thank goodness. Mostly our kids consign us to rusty dumpsters with a sigh.

“Beauty is its own excuse for being,” intoned Emerson memorably. That seems true. Beauty encourages, delights, spangles a muted hour. The sun shines brighter if I’ve written well. But can this be the impulse that hounds me into my study at dawn, opens laptop or journal, and clicks shut my door? This is not running toward, but from. From what? Disorder. Confusion. Chaos. Disappointment. Rage. When my words dance, my world makes momentary sense – evanescent as a slant of light, but even a little heartens.

I share these moments with others whom they might console.

Writing, writers know, solves nothing but it soothes. It makes the pain of being more bearable.

Few writers hurt worse than Flaubert. It is no pose. From first to last he finds refuge in art.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in Art and count all the rest as nothing. (age 24)

In order not to live, I plunge into art, like a man in despair; I make myself drunk with ink as others do with wine. (age 39)

Inability to tolerate human stupidity has become a sickness with me, and that word is weak. Almost all human beings are endowed with the gift of exasperating me, and I breathe freely only in the desert. (age 59, weeks before his death)

He is incapable of a conventional life. He can’t make money (he inherited some, which had dwindled almost to nothing by his death). He loves women fiercely but can’t abide the burden of a wife. He offends intimates with his brutal candor. He secludes himself in the country, “without friends, horse, or dog – in short without any of the attributes of human life”. Psychiatry might judge him insane, as they would mendicant saints, only he, like they, has his passionate faith: for them, God, for Flaubert, Art.

I read his confessions with admiration and a fierce regret. At the start of my career, when I had a choice, I had the yearning but not the courage to choose Art. My Vanity couldn’t withstand the inevitable obloquy and penury. I wanted to impress persons whose values I deplored. I wanted to be rich, famous, glamorous – and to win at tennis!

I did OK, doing what I didn’t want to be doing. I resigned myself. But the urge and its urgency didn’t abate. I shut my door and wrote when I could. Then retirement freed me to write as much as I liked, which was all the time. Yeh, I was a novice in my religion, a late starter, but how many years did Keats have to strut his stuff? Or Schubert? Medical miracles had lengthened my runway. Where there’s life there’s hope.

I’m no sufferer. I love my wife, life, friends, family, dog. I do not rail and writhe. But I revere my saints. Flaubert lived the life I would have if I’d had more guts. He accepted his calling. I hear myself in his voice.

*

For me I can imagine nothing in the world preferable to a nice well-heated room, with the books one loves and the leisure one wants. – 1/1845

Deep down I am serene, but on the surface everything agitates me. It is easier to command one’s heart than one’s face. – 4/1845

I always lack eagerness except where art is concerned. – 4/1845

Travel should be a serious occupation. – 5/1845

The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in Art and count all the rest as nothing. – 5/1845

I have said an irrevocable farewell to the practical life. My nervous illness was the transition between two states. From now until a day that is far distant, I ask for no more than five or six quiet hours in my room, a good fire in winter, and a pair of candles to light me at night. – 5/1845

It’s a strange thing: my sensuality is of the wild, impetuous kind, yet I cannot give a kiss that is not ironic. – 5/1845

Have you sometimes thought, my dear sweet friend, how many tears the horrible word “happiness” is responsible for? If that word didn’t exist, we would sleep more serenely and live in greater peace. – 6/1845

Bare though a rock may be it isn’t bleak when seaweed comes and clings to it, refreshing the granite with drops of water sparkling in its tufts. – 7/1845

Write, write, write – write all you can while the muse bears you along. She is the best battle-steed, the best coach to carry you through life in noble style. The burden of existence does not weigh on our shoulders when we are composing. – 9/1845

Ill, agitated, prey a thousand times a day to moments of terrible anxiety, without women, without wine, without any of the tinsel the world offers, I continue my slow work like a good workman who rolls up his sleeves and sweats away at his anvil, indifferent to rain or wind, hail or thunder… For people like you and me happiness is in the idea, nowhere else. Seek out what is truly your nature and be in harmony with it. Sibi constet, says Horace. That is everything… I try to pass the time in the least boring way possible, and I have found it. Do as I do. Break with the outside world, live like a bear – a polar bear – let everything else go to hell – everything, yourself included, except your intelligence. There is now such a great gap between me and the rest of the world that I am sometimes surprised to hear people say the most natural and simple things. It’s strange how the most banal utterance sometimes makes me marvel… Precisely because I want to understand everything, anything at all sets me wondering. – 9/1845

It is strange, how I was born with little faith in happiness. While still very young, I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like a nauseating smell of cooking escaping through a ventilator: you don’t have to eat it to know it would make you vomit. – 4/1846

Had I expected better things of life, I should have cursed it. – 4/1846

The soul expands with suffering, thus enormously increasing its capacity; what formerly filled it to the point of bursting now barely covers the bottom. – 4/1846

To think is to suffer. – 8/1846

I devote myself to Art because it gives me pleasure to do so, but I have no faith whatever in beauty, any more than in anything else. – 8/1846

Because I always sense the future, the antithesis of everything is always before my eyes. I have never seen a child without thinking that it would grow old, nor a cradle without thinking of a grave. The sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton. – 8/1846

My basic character, whatever anyone may say, is that of the mountebank. In my childhood and my youth I was wildly in love with the stage. I should perhaps have been a great actor if I had happened to be born poorer. Even now, what I love above all else, is form, provided it be beautiful, and nothing beyond it. Women whose hearts are too ardent and whose minds too exclusive do not understand this religion of beauty, beauty considered apart from emotion… I admire tinsel as much as gold: indeed, the poetry of tinsel is even greater because it is sadder. The only things that exist for me in the world are splendid poetry, harmonious, well-turned, singing sentences, beautiful sunsets, moonlight, pictures, ancient sculpture, and strongly marked faces. Beyond that, nothing… In all of politics, there is only one thing that I understand: the riot. I am as fatalistic as a Turk, and believe that whether we do everything we can for the progress of humanity, or nothing at all, makes no whit of difference… I despise modern tyranny because it seems to me stupid, weak, and without the courage of its convictions… I thought long and very seriously (don’t laugh, it is a memory of my best hours) of becoming a Mohammedan in Smyrna. The day will come when I will go and settle somewhere far from here, and nothing more will be heard of me. – 8/1846

Let me love you in my own way, in the way my nature demands, with what you call my originality. Force me to do nothing, and I will do everything. – 8/1846

My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my doubt. – 8/1846

I did with you what in the past I have done with those I loved best. I bared my soul, and the acrid dust that rose from its most secret recesses stuck in their throats. – 8/1846

You say I analyze myself too much: I find that I don’t know myself well enough – every day I discover something new. I travel myself as in a country unknown, even though I have traversed it many times. – 8/1846

Though I do not long for fame (and in this respect I am more naïve than the fox in the fable) I should love to have some for you, to toss it to you like a bouquet; it would be yet another caress, a soft bed where your mind would bask in the sun of my glory. – 8/1846

I never suspected anyone could love me. (Even now that seems unnatural. Love for me! How strange!) – 8/1846

Who is not selfish, to a greater or lesser degree?... Saint Vincent de Paul obeyed an appetite for charity, Caligula an appetite for cruelty. Everyone takes his enjoyment in his own way and for himself alone. – 8/1846

Newspapers disgust me profoundly – I mean the ephemeral, things of the moment, what is important today and won’t be important tomorrow… I am no more modern than I am ancient, no more French than Chinese; and the idea of la patrie, the fatherland – that is, the obligation to live on a bit of earth colored red or blue on a map, and to detest the other bits colored green or black – has always seemed to me narrow, restricted, and ferociously stupid. I am the brother in God of everything that lives, from the giraffe and the crocodile to man, and the fellow-citizen of everyone inhabiting the great furnished mansion called the universe. – 8/1846

I have a particular love for the vegetation that grows in ruins… I find it a sweet thought that one day I’ll help tulips grow. Who knows? The tree at whose feet I’ll be laid may bear splendid fruit. I’ll perhaps make a superb manure, a superior kind of guano. – 8/1846

[I] lead the most bourgeois, the most obscure life in the world. I shall die in my corner without anyone being able, I hope, to blame me for a wicked deed or a bad line, the reason being that I do not make others my concern and will do nothing to make myself theirs… But beneath that existence lies another, a secret other, all radiant and illuminated for me alone. One that I display to no one, because it would arouse laughter. Is that so unreasonable! -- 8/1846

Art watches undisturbed as the world spins round. – 8/1846

There is only one good thing about me, only one thing in myself that I think estimable – I can admire. – 9/1846

I have always seen life differently from others, and the result has been that I’ve always isolated myself (but not sufficiently, alas!) in a state of harsh unsociability, with no exit. I suffered so many humiliations, I so shocked people and made them indignant, that I long ago came to realize that in order to live in peace one must live alone and seal one’s window lest the air of the world seep in. – 9/1846

Every beautiful thought has a beautiful form, and vice versa. – 9/1846

As a rule the philosopher is a kind of mongrel being, a cross between scientist and poet, envious of both. – 9/1846

Popularity, which seems to give genius greater scope, actually vulgarizes it; authentic Beauty is not for the masses. – 9/1846

When I read Shakespeare, I become greater, wiser, purer. When I have reached the crest of one of his works I feel that I am high on a mountain: everything disappears, everything appears. I am no longer a man, I am an eye. – 9/1846

Success doesn’t tempt me. What does tempt me I can provide – my own approval. – 10/1846

A subject to write about is for me like a woman one is in love with: when she is going to yield, one trembles and is afraid. It’s a voluptuous terror. One dares not attain one’s desire. – 10/1846

Critics write criticism because they are unable to be artists, just as a man unfit to bear arms becomes a police spy. – 10/1846

I truly enjoyed that humility, which might have maddened another man to death. For a gifted person to seek success is wanton self-mutilation, and to seek fame is perhaps self-destruction. – 10/1846

Anyone capable of writing correctly would produce a superb book by setting down his memoirs, if he did so with complete sincerity. – 10/1846

The fresh air, the fields, the freedom – I mean real freedom, the kind that consists in saying what you like, thinking aloud together, and walking at random, as oblivious of the passing of time as of the drifting smoke of your pipe. – 4/1847

(Cairo) To amuse the crowd, Mohammed Ali’s jester took a woman in a Cairo bazaar one day, set her on the counter of a shop, and coupled with her publicly while the shopkeeper calmly smoked his pipe. On the road from Cairo to Subra some time ago a young fellow had himself publicly buggered by a large money – as in the story above, to create a good opinion of himself and make people laugh. – 12/1849

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses equally good for saddle and carriage – the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow. – 2/1850

From the past, I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal “what’s the use?” – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis. – 6/1850

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the mélancholies du voyage; perhaps they are one of the most enriching things about traveling. – 6/1850

One thing is our ruin, one stupid thing shackles us: our “taste” – good taste. We have too much of it – or we worry about it more than we should. Fear of bad taste engulfs us like a fog (a dirty December fog that suddenly appears, freeze your guts, stinks, and stings in your eyes), to such a point that we stand still, not daring to advance… The thing is to keep fucking, keep fucking: who cares what child the muse will give birth to? Isn’t the purest pleasure in her embrace? – 12/1850

Every day I feel myself becoming more sensitive, more easily moved. The slightest thing brings a tear. My heart plays the very whore, gushingly receptive to anything and everything. Insignificant details stir my guts. I keep falling into endless reveries and distractions. I continuously feel as though I’m a little drunk, and along with that I’m more and more inept and incapable of understanding anything that’s explained to me. My memory fails me more and more often. Then, great literary frenzies. – 8/1850

Ineptitude consists in wanting to reach conclusions. – 8/1850

The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. – 12/1850

But for the pictures, statues, the XVIth century, Rome is the most splendid museum in the world. The number of masterpieces in the city is dizzying. It is certainly the artists’ city. One could spend one’s life here in a completely ideal atmosphere – outside the world, above it. – 4/1851

Naples is the place to come for a bath in the fountain of youth and to fall in love with life all over again. The sun itself is enamored of the place. Everything is gay and easy. -- 4/1851

Read. Do not brood. Immerse yourself in long study: only the habit of persistent work can make one continually content: it produces an opium that numbs the soul. – 7/1851

It is no small thing to be simple. – 9/1851

The more one lives, the more one suffers. – 10/ 1851

In any case, you will grant me the merit of always speaking the truth. – 10/1851

There are in me, literarily speaking, two distinct persons: one who is infatuated with bombast, lyricism, eagle flights, sonorities of phrase and lofty ideas; and another who digs and burrows into the truth as deeply as he can, who likes to treat a humble fact as respectfully as a big one, who would like to make you feel almost physically the things he reproduces… What I should like to write is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible. The finest works are those that contain the least matter… There are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects; from the standpoint of pure Art one might almost establish the axiom that there is no such thing as a subject – style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things. – 1/1852

I am leading an austere life, stripped of all external pleasure, and am sustained only by a kind of permanent frenzy, which sometimes makes me weep tears of impotence but never abates. I love my work with a love that is frantic and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly. – 4/1852

I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thoughts would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind. Prose was born yesterday, you have to keep that in mind. Verse is the form par excellence of ancient literatures. All possible prosodic variations have been discovered, but that is far from being the case with prose. – 4/1852

To have talent, you must be convinced that you possess it; and to keep your conscience pure you must set it above everybody else’s. The way to live serenely, in clean, fresh air, is to install yourself atop some pyramid, no matter which, provided it be lofty and have a solid foundation. Ah! It isn’t always “amusing” up there, and you are utterly alone; but there is consolation to be taken in spitting from so high a place. – 5/1852

I like clear, sharp sentences which stand erect, erect while running – almost an impossibility… Everything must be as clear as Voltaire, as abrim with substance as Montaigne, as vigorous as La Buyere, and always streaming with color. – 6/1852

“To be known” is not my chief concern: that can give complete gratification only to very mediocre vanities. Besides, is there ever any certainty about this? Even the greatest fame leaves one longing for more, and seldom does anyone but a fool die sure of his reputation… I am aiming at something better – to please myself. Success seems to me a result, not the goal… I have conceived a manner of writing and a nobility of language I want to attain. When I think that I have harvested my fruit, I shan’t refuse to sell it, nor shall I forbid hand-clapping if it is good. In the meantime I do not want to fleece the public. That’s all there is to it… If your work of art is good, if it is authentic, its echo will be heard, it will find its place – in six months, six years, or after you’re gone. What difference does it make? – 6/1852

I work every day from one in the afternoon until one in the morning, except from six o’clock to eight. – 6/1852

If we haven’t the vocation, nothing will come of our efforts; and if, on the contrary, we have it, why worry ourselves about other things? – 7/1852

Passion does not make verses; and the more personal you are, the weaker… The less you feel a thing, the more capable you are of expressing it as it is (as it always is, in its universality, freed from all ephemeral contingencies). – 7/1852

A good prose sentence should be like a good line of poetry – unchangeable, just as rhythmic, just as sonorous. – 7/1852

When you are given no encouragement by others, when the outside world disgusts, weakens, corrupts, and stupefies you, so-called “decent” and “sensitive” people are forced to seek somewhere within themselves a more suitable place to live. If society continues on its present path, I think we shall once again see mystics, such as existed in all dark ages. Unable to expand, the soul will concentrate on itself. – 9/1852

Nothing will extirpate suffering, nothing will eliminate it. Our purpose is not to dry it up, but to create outlets for it. – 9/1852

When you compare yourself to what surrounds you, you find yourself admirable; but when you lift your eyes toward the masters, toward the absolute, toward your dream, how you despise yourself! – 9/1852

Very great men often write badly – and bravo for them. – 9/1852

The bourgeoisie (which today comprises all of mankind, including “the people”) has the same attitude toward the classics as toward religion: it knows that they exist, would be sorry if they didn’t, realizes that they have some vague purpose, but makes no use of them and finds them very boring. – 10/1852

In my opinion ideas can be as entertaining as actions, but in order to be so they must first flow one from another like a series of cascades, carrying the reader along amid the throbbing of sentences and the seething of metaphors. – 10/1852

There are few people who do not become bourgeois at 30. – 12/1852

The novel has only just been born: it awaits its Homer. What a man Balzac would have been, had he known how to write! But that was the only thing he lacked. – 12/1852

There comes a moment when one needs to make oneself suffer, needs to loathe one’s flesh, to fling mud in its face, so hideous it seems. Without my love of form, I would perhaps have been a great mystic. – 12/1852

I am bothered by my tendency to metaphor, decidedly excessive. I am devoured by comparisons as one is by lice, and I spend my time doing nothing but squashing them: my sentences swarm with them – 12/1852

What worries me in my book is the element of entertainment. That side is weak; there is not enough action. I maintain, however, that ideas are actions. It is more difficult to hold the reader’s interest with them, I know, but if the style is right it can be done. – 1/1853

I want a bitter undertaste in everything – always a jeer in the midst of our triumph, desolation in the very midst of enthusiasm. – 3/1853

Ah! Travel makes one modest: one sees what a tiny place one occupies in the world. – 1/1853

I have plans for writing that will keep me busy till the end of my life, and though I sometimes have bitter moments that made me almost scream with rage (so acutely do I feel my own impotence and weakness), I have others when I can scarcely contain myself for joy. Something deep and ultra-voluptuous gushes out of me, like an ejaculation of the soul. I feel transported, drunk with my own thought, as though a hot gust of perfume were being wafted to me through some inner conduit… It is perhaps absurd to want to give prose the rhythm of verse (keeping it distinctly prose, however) … Some day I may find a good motif, a melody completely suited to my voice, neither too high nor too low. In any case, I shall have lived nobly and often delightfully. – 3/1853

There is nothing more pernicious than being able to say everything and having a convenient outlet. You become very indulgent with yourself; and your friends are the same with you, in order that you may be so with them… After all, a magazine is a shop. And being a shop… sooner or later the question of pleasing the customer comes to dominate all others. – 3/1853

At the present moment I believe that a thinker (and what is an artist if not a triple thinker?) should have neither religion, country, nor even social conviction… I am reading Montaigne in bed, now. I know of no more soothing book, none more conducive to peace of mind. It is so healthy, so down to earth! – 4/1853

One can write about any one thing equally well as about any other. The artist must raise everything to a higher level: he is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there, dim and unnoticed, and brings it out in great jets to the sunlight. – 6/1853

Thoroughbred horses and thoroughbred styles have plenty of blood in their veins, and it can be seen pulsing everywhere in them, under the skin and the words. Life! Life! To have erections! That is everything, the only thing that counts! That is why I so love lyricism. It seems the most natural form of poetry – poetry in all its nakedness and freedom. All the power of a work of art lies in this mystery, and it is this primordial quality, this motus animi continuus (vibration, continual movements of the mind – Cicero’s definition of eloquence), which results in conciseness, relief, form, energy, rhythm, diversity. – 7/1853

I think the greatest characteristic of genius is, above all, power. Hence, what I detest most of all in the arts, what sets me on edge, is the ingenious, the clever. – 7/1853

It wasn’t without a certain pleasure that I surveyed my ruined garden [after the hailstorm], all my flowers torn to pieces, the disheveled vegetable garden. As I contemplated all these factitious little man-made arrangements which five minutes of nature had sufficed to destroy, I admired the way the true order had reimposed itself on the false. These things so tormented by us – trees pruned and shaped, flowers growing where they don’t want to, vegetables brought from other countries – they all found a kind of revenge in this atmospheric rebuke… It is generally believed that the sun has no other function here below than to help cabbages along. Now and then we must restore God to his pedestal. – 7/1853

What a din industry makes in the world! What a clackety thing the machine is! Speaking of industry, have you sometimes thought of the quantity of stupid professions it begets, and the vast amount of stupidity that must inevitably accrue from them over the years! – 8/1853

Live like a bourgeois, and think like a demigod… If you seek happiness and beauty at the same time, you will find neither the one nor the other, for the latter is attained only by sacrifice. Art, like the God of the Jews, feasts on holocausts. – 8/1853

What seems to me the highest and most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, nor arouse our lust or rage, but to do what nature does – that is, to set us dreaming. The most beautiful works have this quality. They are serene in aspect, inscrutable. The means by which they act on us are various: they are as motionless as cliffs, stormy as the ocean, leafy green and murmurous as forests, forlorn as the desert, blue as the sky… pitiless… unfathomable, infinite, manifold. Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose somber depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness. It is like the brilliance of light, the smile of the sun; and it is calm, calm and strong. – 8/1853

Is one ever harmed by what one enjoys doing? A vocation patiently and candidly pursued becomes almost a physical function, a way of existence that occupies one’s whole being. – 12/1853

When you love a person completely you love him just as he is, with his faults and monstrousnesses; you adore even his scabs, and the hump on his back; you love to inhale the breath that poisons you… I will not change, I will not reform. I have already erased, corrected, blotted out or suppressed so many things in myself that I am weary of it… I was born with all the vices. I have radically suppressed some and kept the rest on a starvation diet. – 1/1854

Shakespeare frightens me the more I think of him. In their entirety, I find his works stupendous, exalting, like the idea of the planetary system. I see only an immensity there, dazzling and bewildering to the eye. – 1/1854

Brothels provide condoms as protection against catching the pox from infected vaginas. Let us always have a vast condom within us to protect the health of our soul amid the filth into which it is plunged. The pleasure is diminished, it is true, and sometimes the sheath splits. 1/1854

The writer’s vocation is perhaps comparable to love for one’s native land (of which I have little, by the way), a certain fated bond between men and things. The Siberian in his snow and the Hottentot in his hut both live content, not dreaming of the sun or of palaces. Something stronger than they keeps them attached to their miserable environment, while we flounder about in our search for Forms. Whether poets, sculptors, or musicians, we perceive existence as refracted in words, colors, or harmonies, and we find that the most wonderful thing in the world. – 1/1854

Thanks to industrialism, ugliness has assumed gigantic proportions. – 1/1854

We are all fakes and charlatans. Pretense, affectation, humbug everywhere – the crinoline has falsified the buttocks. Our century is a century of whores, and so far what is least prostituted is the prostitute. – 1/1854

I feel waves of hatred for the stupidity of my age. They choke me. Shit keeps coming into my mouth, as from a strangulated hernia… I want to make a paste of it and daub it over the nineteenth century the way they coat Indian pagodas with cow dung. – 9/1855

The artist in his work must be like God in his creation – invisible and all-powerful: he must be everywhere felt but never seen. – 3/1857

A book can be full of enormities and blunders and be no less splendid for that. – 7/1857

In order for one’s book to sweat truth, one has to be stuffed to the ears with its subject. Then the color comes quite naturally, like a result decreed by fate, and like a flowering of the very idea. – 8/1857

Few men, I think, will have suffered as much as I for literature… You cling to the religious ideas that cause you such suffering, and I to the chimera of style, which consumes me body and soul. But perhaps we are worth something because of our sufferings, for these are all aspirations. There are so many people whose joys are so ignoble and whose ideals so shallow, that we must bless our troubles if they make us more worthy. – 11/1857

How difficult it is to write something that has substance and at the same time moves! This is essential, however. On every page there must be food and drink, action and color. – 11/1857

I’ll be in Paris Tuesday or Wednesday of next week… Once there I’m going to go in for some monstrous debauches, to restore my morale. I’m longing for them. Perhaps by sticking something up my ass I can give my brain a good fucking. – 12/1857

What I am undertaking to do is insane and will have no success with the public. No matter! One must write for oneself, first and foremost. Only that way does one stand a chance of producing something good. – 7/1858

A book is something essentially organic, a part of ourselves. We tear out a length of our gut from our bellies and serve it up to the bourgeois. Drops of our hearts’ blood are visible in every letter we trace. – 1/1859

I am convinced that the most raging material appetites express themselves unwittingly in outbursts of idealism, just as the most obscene carnal excesses are engendered by pure desire for the impossible ethereal aspiration toward supreme bliss. Besides, neither I nor anyone knows the meaning of those two words “soul” and “body” – nor where one leaves off and the other begins… The anatomy of the human heart is as yet uncharted. – 2/1859

Style is merely a manner of thinking: if your conception is weak your writing will never be strong… Style underlies words as much as it is embodied in them. It is as much the soul of a work as its flesh. – 8/1859

I mean to live as I do: (1) in the country three-quarters of the year; (2) without a wife (a rather delicate little point, but considerable); without friends, horse, or dog – in short, without any of the attributes of human life; (3) and then, for me everything outside the work itself counts for nothing. Success, time, money, publication, are relegated to the lower level of my mind, off in some very vague horizons that are of no concern to me whatever. All that seems to me dull as dishwater, and unworthy (I repeat the word, unworthy) of exciting one’s brain about.

The impatience of literary folk to see themselves in print, acted, known, praised, I find astonishing – like a madness. That seems to me to have no more to do with a writer’s work than dominoes or politics. Voilà.

Anybody can do as I do – work just as slowly as I, and better. All you have to do is rid yourself of certain tastes, and sacrifice a few pleasures. I am not at all virtuous, but I am consistent… I could have been rich; I said fuck all that, and I continue to live like a Bedouin, in my desert and my pride. Shit, shit, shit: such is my motto. – 8/1859

Once you have kissed a corpse on the forehead, something of it always remains on your lips – an infinite bitterness, an aftertaste of annihilation that nothing ever effaces. – 1860

An author is not at all free to write this or that. He does not choose his subject. That is what the public and the critics do not understand. Therein lies the secret of masterpieces – in the concordance of the subject and the author’s temperament. – 1861

Not to resemble one’s neighbor: that is everything. – 1860

I love history, madly. The dead are more to my taste than the living. –7/1860

In periods of despair, I dream of travel – a poor remedy. – 7/1860

In order not to live, I plunge into art, like a man in despair; I make myself drunk with ink as others do with wine. (1860)

The day before his death Socrates in his prison asked a musician to teach him an air on the lyre. “What’s the use,” said the man, “since you’re about to die?” “To know it before I die,” answered Socrates. – 1861

It is thanks to work that I am able to stifle the melancholy I was born with. But often the old dregs resurface, the old dregs that no one knows of, the deep, secret wound. – 10/1864

I have a fundamental reason for being depressed – the conviction that I’m writing something useless; I mean contrary to the goal of Art, which is exaltation… Beauty is not compatible with modern life. – 12/1864

My present self is the result of my vanished selves. – 9/1866

What an absurd life mine is, and I want no other! – 11/1866

Each of us carries his necropolis within him. – 11/1866

Large natures (and those are the good ones) are above all prodigal, and don’t keep such strict account of how they expend themselves. – 11/1866

A novelist hasn’t the right to express his opinion on anything whatsoever. Had God ever expressed his opinion? – 12/1866

This is what I experienced whenever I had hallucinations.

1. First, an indeterminate anxiety; a vague malaise, a sensation of expectancy accompanied by distress, the sort of thing that precedes poetic inspiration, when one feels that “something is about to happen.” (A state that can only be compared to the feeling, while fucking, that the sperm is coming and that discharge is about to take place. Do I make myself clear?)

2. Then, suddenly, like a thunderbolt, instantaneous invasion, or rather irruption, by memory, for hallucination, properly so-called, is nothing other than that, at least for me. It is a spewing out of memory, an outpouring of what it has stored up. You feel images escaping from you like a hemorrhage. It is as though everything inside your head were exploding all at once, like the thousand fragments of a firework, and you have no time to observe these internal images which follow one another furiously. In other circumstances, the hallucination begins with a single image, which grows, expands, and ends by obscuring objective realty, like, for example, a spark that flits about and then becomes a great flaming fire. In the latter case, one may well be thinking of something else at the same time, and this is almost indistinguishable from the phenomenon called “black butterflies” – those small shining specks we see floating in the air when the sky is gray and our eyes are tired.

I believe Will plays a great role in hallucinations. When I have tried to induce them, I have never succeeded; on the other hand, often, in fact usually, I have rid myself of them by force of will.

In my early youth I used to have a peculiar hallucination: when I was in a theatre I always saw skeletons instead of the spectators; or at least I had the idea so strongly that it resembled a hallucination – where one begins and the other ends can be hard to determine. – 12/1866

As for earning money by my pen, it’s something I’ve never envisaged, recognizing that I’m fundamentally incapable of it. Therefore one leads a modest country life on what one has. Not a supremely amusing existence. But there are so many other people, more deserving than I, who haven’t a sou, that it would be wrong to complain. Besides, railing against Providence is such a common way of going on that one should abstain if only for good form. – 2/1867

Men will always consider sexual pleasure the most important thing in their lives. – 2/1867

Axiom: hatred of the Bourgeois is the beginning of virtue. – 5/1867

The day I stop being indignant I’ll fall flat on my face, like a doll when you take away its prop. – 6/1867

Last Thursday I was 46 – occasion for philosophical reflection! Looking back, I don’t see that I have wasted my life, and yet what have I accomplished, God help me? It’s time to produce something worthwhile. – 12/1867

I’m working furiously. I’ve written a description of the forest of Fontainebleau that made me want to hang myself from one of its trees. I had interrupted myself for three weeks and had great trouble getting back into my stride. I’m like a camel – you can’t stop him when he’s on the go, not make him start when he’s resting. – 9/1868

A man who has no common sense mustn’t live by common-sense rules.

As for my mania for work, I’ll compare it to a rash. I keep scratching myself and yelling as I scratch. It’s pleasure and torture combined. And nothing that I write is what I want to write. For one doesn’t choose one’s subjects: they impose themselves. Will I ever find mine? Will there ever drop down on me from heaven an idea in perfect harmony with my temperament? Will I be able to write a book into which I put my entire self?...

As for the cloistered life to which I condemn myself being a “delicate existence” – no! But what to do! To get drunk on ink is better than to get drunk on brandy. The Muse, crabbed though she may be, is the source of less grief than Woman! I cannot accommodate the two. One has to choose. My choice was made long ago… To be truthful, living strikes me as a trade I wasn’t cut out for! 1/1869

Life perforce is an incessant education. Everything has to be learned, from Talking to Dying. – 2/1869

There are so few people who love what I love, who are concerned with the things that are my chief care. Do you know, in all the vastness of Paris, a single house where the talk is about Literature? And when it is alluded to incidentally, it is always in connection to its minor, external aspects – the question of success, morality, utility, timeliness, etc. I am becoming a fossil, a being unconnected with the life around me… As for ladies, there are none available hereabouts, and even if there were!.. I have never been able to accommodate Venus with Apollo. For me it has always been the one or the other – being, as I am, a creature of excess, given over entirely to what I’m engaged in. – 5/1870

You said rightly that in order to work one needs a degree of cheerfulness. Where is it to be found in these accursed times? – 7/1870

It is impossible for me to read anything whatever: still more, to write. I spend my time like everybody else, waiting for news. – 8/1870

The Greeks in the time of Pericles devoted themselves to Art without knowing where their next day’s bread would come from. Let us be Greek! – 9/1870

When I feel hope I try to suppress it. And yet, deep within me, despite everything, I can’t help hoping a little, just a little. I think that in France there is no sadder man than I. (Everything depends on one’s sensitivity.) I am dying of grief. That is the truth. And anything said in consolation irritates me. What breaks my heart is (1) human ferocity; (2) the conviction that we are about to enter an era of stupidity. We’ll be utilitarian, militaristic, American, and Catholic… the Age of the Boor is upon us. – 11/1870

All evil stems from our colossal ignorance. What ought to be pondered, is simply believed, without discussion. Instead of considering, people tell you. – 3/1871

I have long accepted patience as one accepts the weather, the length of the winter, old age, lack of success in all its forms. – 4/1871

How sad it is to watch the slow deterioration of those you love! – 4/1871

What are we to believe in, then? Nothing! Such is the beginning of Wisdom. It is time to rid ourselves of “Principles” and to espouse Science, objective inquiry. – 4/1871

I believe that the crowd, the mass, the herd, will always be detestable. Nothing is important save a small group of minds, ever the same, which pass on the torch. – 9/1871

A trip to Paris is a great undertaking for me these days. As soon as I shake the bottle, the dregs rise and spoil everything. The slightest discussion with anyone at all exasperates me, because I find everybody idiotic… “Conceal your life,” says Epictetus. My entire ambition is to avoid trouble. And by doing so I’m certain to avoid causing any to others, which is saying much. – 10/1872

The principal thing in this world is to keep one’s soul aloft, high above the bourgeois and democratic sloughs. The cult of Art gives one pride; no one can have enough of it. Such is my morality. 2/1873

I read nothing at all except Shakespeare, whom I’m going through again from first to last. How he reinvigorates one, puts air into the lungs as though one were atop a high mountain! Everything seems mediocre beside this prodigy… -- 12/1875

You and I are so incapable of earning our living! It’s a sign of a lofty nature but not always gay. – 12/1876

The jerking-off of one gentleman by another in a public urinal has entranced the Capitol of the Civilized World for a fortnight. Neither the most beautiful works of art nor the greatest scientific discoveries ever generated such excitement when they burst upon the world. The Far Eastern situation is completely overshadowed by this worthy person’s discharge. – 12/1876

Where is there anyone who relishes a good sentence? That aristocratic pleasure is in the realm of archaeology. – 4/1877

Too many whores! Too much rowing! Too much exercise! Yes, sir: civilized man doesn’t need so much locomotion as the doctors pretend. You were born to write poetry: write it! All the rest is futile – beginning with your fun and your health: get that into your head… Sacrifice everything for Art. Life must be considered by the artist as a means, nothing more; and the first person he shouldn’t give a hang about is himself. – 8/1878

Haven’t you noticed that without the Concept of Happiness existence would be more bearable? We demand more from it than it can give. – 8/1878

I feel spiritually soiled by all these sordid concerns, by all this commercial talk. I feel I’m being turned into a shopkeeper…Honors dishonor; titles degrade; bureaucracy benumbs. – 9/1878

Why can’t I die, so that I can be left alone? – 2/1879

Inability to tolerate human stupidity has become a sickness with me, and that word is weak. Almost all human beings are endowed with the gift of exasperating me, and I breathe freely only in the desert. – 1/1880

There is no “True.” There are only ways of perceiving. Is a photograph a likeness? No more so than an oil painting, or about as much so… Assume that documents were discovered proving that Tacitus lied from beginning to end. What would that do to the glory and style of Tacitus? Nothing whatever. Instead of one truth we would have two: that of History and that of Tacitus. – 2/1880

All quotations are from The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller. (1979, 1982)