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The man is nothing, the work — all.

— Gustave Flaubert

L'homme n'est rien, l'oeuvre – tout

Original text (French)

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Notes from Wikiquote

Slightly misquoted in "The Red-Headed League" by Arthur Conan Doyle as L'homme c'est rien – l'oeuvre c'est tout.

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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.

All Gustave Flaubert quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gustave Flaubert (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.