Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

About Gustave Flaubert:

Gustave Flaubert is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Je ne suis pas plus moderne qu'ancien, pas plus Français que Chinois, et l'idée de la patrie c'est-à-dire l'obligation où l'on est de vivre sur un coin de terre marqué en rouge ou en bleu sur la carte et de détester les autres coins en vert ou ...

Gustave Flaubert

Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué." [Letter to Armand Barbès, 12 May 1867]

Gustave Flaubert

J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible." [Letter to Jules Boucoiran, 4 March 1831]

Gustave Flaubert

I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in th...

Gustave Flaubert

Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?

Gustave Flaubert

Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can’t stiffen up enough to create them.

Gustave Flaubert

The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame.

Gustave Flaubert

The world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. We’re lucky to be living now.

Gustave Flaubert

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

Gustave Flaubert

So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!

Gustave Flaubert

To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one ...

Gustave Flaubert

I have patience in all things – as far as the antechamber.

Gustave Flaubert

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, t...

Gustave Flaubert

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

Gustave Flaubert

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

Gustave Flaubert

The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.

Gustave Flaubert

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

Gustave Flaubert

Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless it is the same everywhere. There are businessmen, pol...

Gustave Flaubert

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Su...

Gustave Flaubert

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

Gustave Flaubert

Ils en conclurent que la syntaxe est une fantaisie et la grammaire une illusion.

Gustave Flaubert

Author Bio

  • NameGustave Flaubert
  • Description1821-1880 French writer
  • BornDecember 12, 1821
  • DiedMay 8, 1880
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • Works