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Gustave Flaubert Quotes
1821–1880 France
Gustave Flaubert (December 12 1821 – May 8 1880) was an influential French writer who was perhaps the leading exponent of literary realism of his country. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics.
France Novelists Short story writers Also known as: Flaubert, Flaubert, Gustave
Random Gustave Flaubert quote
31 quotes
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Sentimental Education (1869)
One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.
What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.
One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.
For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.
Sentimental Education (1869)
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
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.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
What a horrible invention, the bourgeois, don't you think?
In their extremity of terror all became brave.
Salammbô (1862)
He is so corrupt that he would willingly pay for the pleasure of selling himself.
Sentimental Education (1869)
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
Don't talk to me about your hideous reality! What does it mean — reality?
Sentimental Education (1869)
Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.
Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.
The man is nothing, the work — all.
My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my doubt.
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