Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Author Image

Gustave Flaubert

Profession : Novelist

Birth : December 12, 1821

What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.

Gustave Flaubert

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

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

Gustave Flaubert

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

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

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

Gustave Flaubert

I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.

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

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

Gustave Flaubert

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Gustave Flaubert

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

Gustave Flaubert

The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.

Gustave Flaubert

Read much, but not many books.

Gustave Flaubert

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

Gustave Flaubert

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

Gustave Flaubert

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

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

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