Gustave Flaubert quotes page 1
12 December 1821 – 8 May 1880, French author
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
A man has missed something if he has never left a brothel at dawn feeling like throwing
himself into the river out of sheer disgust with life.
Gustave Flaubert
Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this.
Gustave Flaubert
A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
Gustave Flaubert
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
Gustave Flaubert
The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on
white linens.
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
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Gustave Flaubert
A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Gustave Flaubert
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
Gustave Flaubert
Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented
when they got tired of all the others.
Gustave Flaubert
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the
greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
Gustave Flaubert
Exuberance is better than taste.
Gustave Flaubert
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Gustave Flaubert
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Gustave Flaubert
I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally
that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.
Gustave Flaubert
I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its
high priests.
Gustave Flaubert
The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
Gustave Flaubert
A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
Gustave Flaubert
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Gustave Flaubert
Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my
opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.
Gustave Flaubert
I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
Gustave Flaubert
The future is the worst thing about the present.
Gustave Flaubert
By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream.
Gustave Flaubert
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by
the bourgeois.
Gustave Flaubert
Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
Gustave Flaubert
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
Gustave Flaubert
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
Gustave Flaubert
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Gustave Flaubert
Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is
like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
Gustave Flaubert
Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
Gustave Flaubert
Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
Gustave Flaubert
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which
attracts us.
Gustave Flaubert
One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon
when he cannot be a soldier.
Gustave Flaubert
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
Gustave Flaubert
It's hard to communicate anything exactly and that's why perfect relationships between
people are difficult to find.
Gustave Flaubert
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