Gustave Flaubert Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by 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
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One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
~Gustave Flaubert
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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
~Gustave Flaubert
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All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
~Gustave Flaubert
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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
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To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
~Gustave Flaubert
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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
~Gustave Flaubert
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The future is the worst thing about the present.
~Gustave Flaubert
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As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
~Gustave Flaubert
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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
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The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
~Gustave Flaubert
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
~Gustave Flaubert
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One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
~Gustave Flaubert
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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
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The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
~Gustave Flaubert
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I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.
~Gustave Flaubert
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
~Gustave Flaubert
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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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One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Read in order to live.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
~Gustave Flaubert
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I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.
~Gustave Flaubert
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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
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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
~Gustave Flaubert
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One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
~Gustave Flaubert
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The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Exuberance is better than taste.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
~Gustave Flaubert
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It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
~Gustave Flaubert
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.
~Gustave Flaubert
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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
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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
~Gustave Flaubert
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A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
~Gustave Flaubert
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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
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I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
~Gustave Flaubert
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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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Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
~Gustave Flaubert
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I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
~Gustave Flaubert
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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
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Madame Bovary is myself.
~Gustave Flaubert
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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
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Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Read much, but not many books.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
~Gustave Flaubert
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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
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The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
~Gustave Flaubert
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What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.
~Gustave Flaubert
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The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.
~Gustave Flaubert
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What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
~Gustave Flaubert
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One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
~Gustave Flaubert
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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
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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
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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
~Gustave Flaubert
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One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
~Gustave Flaubert
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A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
~Gustave Flaubert
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The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
~Gustave Flaubert
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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
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Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
~Gustave Flaubert
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Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
~Gustave Flaubert
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The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
~Gustave Flaubert
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The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
~Gustave Flaubert
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