110+ Gustave Flaubert Quotes (Realistic, Detailed And Satirical)

Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist of the mid-19th century. He is best known for his novel Madame Bovary, which tells the story of a woman's adulterous affairs and her eventual suicide. Flaubert was a realist writer, known for his attention to detail and his use of language to create vivid imagery.

Top 10 Gustave Flaubert Quotes

1. Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
2. Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
3. Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
4. 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.
5. A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
6. I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
7. There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
8. To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
9. Read in order to live.
10. The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

Gustave Flaubert Image Quotes

Read in order to live. — Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Short Quotes

• Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
• The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
• The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
• Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
• There is no truth. There is only perception.
• All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
• Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
• A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
• How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.
• Exuberance is better than taste.

Gustave Flaubert Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins. — Gustave Flaubert

Read in order to live. — Gustave Flaubert

The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness! — Gustave Flaubert

It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find. — Gustave Flaubert

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless. — Gustave Flaubert

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us. — Gustave Flaubert

I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul. — Gustave Flaubert

What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings? — Gustave Flaubert

For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet. — Gustave Flaubert

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth. — Gustave Flaubert

It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. — Gustave Flaubert

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful! — 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

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes. — Gustave Flaubert

Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears. — Gustave Flaubert

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless. — Gustave Flaubert

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful. — Gustave Flaubert

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

I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed. — Gustave Flaubert

The future is the worst thing about the present. — Gustave Flaubert

Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness. — Gustave Flaubert

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within. — Gustave Flaubert

After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it. — Gustave Flaubert

Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness. — Gustave Flaubert

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means. — Gustave Flaubert

But an infinity of passions can be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a tiny space. — Gustave Flaubert

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest. — Gustave Flaubert

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right. — Gustave Flaubert

She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris. — Gustave Flaubert

Coffee: Induces wit. Good only if it comes through Havre. After a big dinner party it is taken standing up. Take it without sugar - very swank: gives the impression you have lived in the East. — Gustave Flaubert

Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal? — Gustave Flaubert

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

I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter — Gustave Flaubert

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

One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod. — Gustave Flaubert

It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt. — Gustave Flaubert

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key. — Gustave Flaubert

Casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands. — Gustave Flaubert

I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world — Gustave Flaubert

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful. — Gustave Flaubert

As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back. — Gustave Flaubert

Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments. — Gustave Flaubert

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything — Gustave Flaubert

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts. — Gustave Flaubert

You can't find the soul with a scalpel. — Gustave Flaubert

Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase. — Gustave Flaubert

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real. — Gustave Flaubert

After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again. — Gustave Flaubert

The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence. — Gustave Flaubert

What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible. — Gustave Flaubert

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight. — Gustave Flaubert

Of all lies, art is the least untrue. — Gustave Flaubert

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect. — Gustave Flaubert

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought! — Gustave Flaubert

Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves. — 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

Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation. — Gustave Flaubert

… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing! — Gustave Flaubert

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in! — Gustave Flaubert

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft. — Gustave Flaubert

Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it. — 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

On spinach: I dislike it, and am happy to dislike it because if I liked it I would eat it, and I cannot stand it. — Gustave Flaubert

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. — Gustave Flaubert

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands. — Gustave Flaubert

Mediocrity cherishes rules; as for me, I hate them; I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom. — Gustave Flaubert

It seems to me... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities. — Gustave Flaubert

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it. — Gustave Flaubert

Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work. — Gustave Flaubert

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom. — Gustave Flaubert

Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire? — Gustave Flaubert

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table. — Gustave Flaubert

The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers. — Gustave Flaubert

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous. — Gustave Flaubert

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage. — Gustave Flaubert

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work. — Gustave Flaubert

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible. — Gustave Flaubert

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop. — Gustave Flaubert

The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it. — Gustave Flaubert

Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us. — Gustave Flaubert

Tout ce qu'on invente est vrai, soi-en sure. La poesie est une chose aussi precise que la geometrie. — Gustave Flaubert

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry. — Gustave Flaubert

Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain? — Gustave Flaubert

Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar. — Gustave Flaubert

Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible. — Gustave Flaubert

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel. — Gustave Flaubert

Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart. — Gustave Flaubert

My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid. — Gustave Flaubert

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling. — Gustave Flaubert

Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart. — Gustave Flaubert

Life Lessons by Gustave Flaubert

1. Gustave Flaubert taught the importance of hard work and dedication to one's craft, as he spent years perfecting his writing and striving for perfection.
2. He also stressed the importance of living life to the fullest and embracing the beauty of the world around us.
3. Finally, Flaubert believed in the power of self-reflection and introspection, encouraging readers to look inward and be honest with themselves.