Gustave Flaubert Quotes

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Gustave Flaubert

Profession : Novelist

Birth : December 12, 1821

One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.

Gustave Flaubert

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Gustave Flaubert

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

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

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Exuberance is better than taste.

Gustave Flaubert

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Gustave Flaubert

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

Gustave Flaubert

Read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

Gustave Flaubert

Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary is myself.

Gustave Flaubert

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

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

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

The future is the worst thing about the present.

Gustave Flaubert

The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.

Gustave Flaubert

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

Gustave Flaubert

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

Gustave Flaubert