Gustave Flaubert quotes

Gustave Flaubert was a renowned French novelist, celebrated for his meticulous style and profound influence on literary realism. His most famous work, "Madame Bovary," explores themes of desire, disillusionment, and social constraint. He is considered one of the greatest literary figures of the nineteenth century. Here are 168 of his quotes:

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. (Gustave Flaubert)

There is no truth. There is only perception.

Gustave Flaubert

To be stupid and selfish and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

Gustave Flaubert

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Gustave Flaubert

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

Gustave Flaubert

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

Gustave Flaubert

The artist must be in his work like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful, so that he is felt everywhere but not seen.

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

The man is nothing, the work - all. (December 1875)

Gustave Flaubert

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Gustave Flaubert

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. (Gustave Flaubert)

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert

You must not think that feeling is everything. . . . Art is nothing without form.

Gustave Flaubert

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

Gustave Flaubert

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

Gustave Flaubert

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Gustave Flaubert

Read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Gustave Flaubert

One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.

Gustave Flaubert

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough. (Gustave Flaubert)

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

Gustave Flaubert

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Gustave Flaubert

Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.

Gustave Flaubert

Exuberance is better than taste.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert - Image

Occupation: French Novelist
Born: December 12, 1821
Died: May 8, 1880
Quotes count: 168
Wikipedia: Gustave Flaubert

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