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

Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expec...

Gustave Flaubert

Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls,...

Gustave Flaubert

Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned to you? All the memories of my youth speak to me as I walk, just as the sea shells crunch under my feet on the beach. The ...

Gustave Flaubert

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.

Gustave Flaubert

People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.

Gustave Flaubert

I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of s...

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country, that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black, has always seemed ...

Gustave Flaubert

Read in oreder to live

Gustave Flaubert

But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

Gustave Flaubert

I believe in Supreme Being, a Creator, whoever he may be, it's of no importance to me, who put us here on earth to do our duty as citizens and fathers; but I don't need to go to church and kiss silver platters and dig into my pocket to fatten up a lo...

Gustave Flaubert

There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me

Gustave Flaubert

Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.

Gustave Flaubert

The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror

Gustave Flaubert

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

Gustave Flaubert

Travel, leave everything, copy the birds. The home is one of civilization’s sadnesses.

Gustave Flaubert

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

Gustave Flaubert

An overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like. I want to know what they do, where they're from, their names, what they're thinking about at that moment, what they regret, what they hope for, their past loves, their curr...

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

Comme l'on serait savant si l'on connaissait bien seulement cinq à six livres. ( How wise one might be if one knew thoroughly only some half of a dozen books

Gustave Flaubert

It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them.

Gustave Flaubert

Author Bio

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