Gustave Flaubert (born 12 December 1821 Rouen, Kingdom of France – died 8 May 1880, Croisset, Rouen, French Third Republic) was a French novelist. He is widely regarded as the leading exponent of literary realism in French literature. Literary theorist Kornelije Kvas believes that Flaubert’s "in Flaubert, realism strives for formal perfection, so the presentation of reality tends to be neutral, emphasizing the values and importance of style as an objective method of presenting reality". Gustave Flaubert is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857), his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics.
12 Gustave Flaubert Quotes to Motivate You
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
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 such transports.... When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.
Gustave Flaubert
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft.To be simple is no small matter.Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.There is no truth. There is only perception.I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.Talent is nothing but long patience.One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
4 Gustave Flaubert Quotes on Success
Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.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.Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
11 Gustave Flaubert Quotes on Poetry, Writing and Reading
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.The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
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
5 Gustave Flaubert on Women
We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep.
Gustave Flaubert
Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.
At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.
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
5 Gustave Flaubert about Love
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings—a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.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.
5 Gustave Flaubert Quotes on Life
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.Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.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.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.
6 Gustave Flaubert Quotes on Art
The morality of art is in its very beauty.What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.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.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.Of all lies, art is the least untrue.You don’t make art out of good intentions.
6 Gustave Flaubert Quotes on Stupidity
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
2 Gustave Flaubert Quotes on History
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
27 Gustave Flaubert Quotes That Make You Think
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.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.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.It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.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.Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.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.She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.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.By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream.I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.For him, the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.The future is the worst thing about the present.A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.The author, in his work, must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
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 the realm of hypothesis.
