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

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

Gustave Flaubert

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

Gustave Flaubert

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

Gustave Flaubert

Read much, but not many books.

Gustave Flaubert

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

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

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

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

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

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

Gustave Flaubert

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

Gustave Flaubert

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where ...

Gustave Flaubert

I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fasc...

Gustave Flaubert

If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stub...

Gustave Flaubert

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

Gustave Flaubert

The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.

Gustave Flaubert

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

Gustave Flaubert

Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no pu...

Gustave Flaubert

Adieu, mon cher vieux. Relis et rebûche ton conte. Laisse-le reposer et reprends-le, les livres ne se font pas comme les enfants, mais comme les pyramides, avec un dessin prémédité, et en apportant des grands blocs l´un par-dessus l´autre, à f...

Gustave Flaubert

No, read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

Author Bio

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