Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist. Highly influential, he has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, “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”. He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857), his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert. These Gustave Flaubert quotes will motivate you.
Best Gustave Flaubert Quotes
- “One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “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
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“There is no truth. There is only perception.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “The principal thing in this world is to keep one’s soul aloft.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.” ~ 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 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
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“To be simple is no small matter.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “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
- “Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” ~ Gustave Flaubert , Gustave Flaubert quotes on travel
- “What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to arouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
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“The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Talent is nothing but long patience.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “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.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
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“The future is the worst thing about the present.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “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.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
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“Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “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
- “I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan, and then comes back to life three days later!” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “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.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
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“Exuberance is better than taste.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain?” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “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.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
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“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “I have dreamed much and have done very little.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “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.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “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
- “Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror” ~ Gustave Flaubert
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“Read in order to live.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
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“For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “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.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “One’s duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea–of an ideal.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “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.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
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“The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “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.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else’s – monotonous, sensible, stupid.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “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
