Gustave Flaubert Quotes, Sayings, Remarks, Thoughts and Speeches
Gustave Flaubert Quotes and Sayings
- 1
A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 2
A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 3
A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 4
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 5
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 6
Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 7
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 8
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 9
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 10
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 11
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 12
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 13
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 14
Exuberance is better than taste.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 15
Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 16
Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 17
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.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 18
I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 19
I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 20
I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 21
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 22
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 23
I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 24
I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 25
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 26
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 27
Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 28
Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 29
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 30
Madame Bovary is myself.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 31
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 32
Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 33
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 34
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 35
One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 36
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 37
One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 38
One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 39
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 40
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 41
One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 42
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 43
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 44
Read much, but not many books.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 45
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 46
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 47
Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 48
Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 49
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 50
The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 51
The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 52
The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 53
The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 54
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 55
The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 56
The future is the worst thing about the present.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 57
The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 58
The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 59
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 60
The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 61
The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 62
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 63
There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 64
There is no truth. There is only perception.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 65
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 66
What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 67
What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 68
Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 69
Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
Gustave Flaubert | Refcard PDF ↑
- 70
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
