Quotes by
Gustave Flaubert |
1821-1880 , French writer
Influential French novelist who was the leading exponent of literary realism. He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857). | 43 quotes | 2,558 visits |
Quotations
| • | Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory. 7 |
| • | An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. 6 |
| • | 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. 3 |
| • | The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel. 3 |
| • | Poor little thing! She’s gasping for love like a carp on a kitchen table gasping for water. 2 |
| • | And now, she could not believe that the meaningless life she was living was the happiness she had dreamed of. — Madame Bovary |
| • | Adultery, Emma discovered, could be just as boring as marriage. — Madame Bovary |
| • | She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris. — Madame Bovary |
| • | Do not trust the frustrated. They are usually incompetent. |
| • | Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in. |
| • | Without ideality, there is no grandeur; without grandeur there is no beauty. |
| • | Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work. |
| • | What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it. |
| • | To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. |
| • | What a horrible invention, the bourgeois, don’t you think? |
| • | The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity. |
| • | Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. |
| • | Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. |
| • | Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers. |
| • | The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe. |
| • | You don’t make art out of good intentions. |
| • | There is no truth. There is only perception. |
| • | I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is. |
| • | He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him. |
| • | She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books. — Madame Bovary |
| • | Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living. |
| • | She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it was scattered among ruins. |
| • | One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier. |
| • | The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded. |
| • | Read much, but not many books. |
| • | Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry. |
| • | The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet. |
| • | The future is the worst thing about the present. |
| • | The deepest way to feel something is to suffer from it. |
| • | The most beautiful works are those where there is the least material. |
| • | Lie during the day and dream at night, there is the man. |
| • | The best of life is to say “It's too early” and then “It's too late”. |
| • | Happiness is a myth invented by the devil to make us despair. |
| • | Perhaps death has no more secrets to reveal to us than life? |
| • | The difficult thing in literature is knowing what not to say. |
| • | If the face is the mirror of the soul, then there are people who have ugly souls. |
| • | The weak places in a book need to be better written than the others. |
| • | After a certain age, the two arms of a chair attract you more than the two arms of a woman. |
