Gustave Flaubert Quotes

• Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Topics in Life, Work

• What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

  Gustave Flaubert

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry

• There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Poetry

• The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing

• Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Topics in Perfection

  Tags in Cannot, Attain, Anything, Everything, Seek, Those, Artist

• A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Topics in Death

  Tags in Dies

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry, Language

• Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Topics in Ideals

  Tags in Reality

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry

• Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Topics in Art

  Tags in Least, Untrue, Lies

• 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

• Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.

  Gustave Flaubert

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

  Gustave Flaubert

• What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

  Gustave Flaubert

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

  Gustave Flaubert

• There is no truth. There is only perception.

  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

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

  Gustave Flaubert

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

  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

Gustave Flaubert (109)

Birth:	12th December, 1821
Death:	8th May, 1880
Nationality:	French
Profession:	Novelist, Playwriter, Writer

About

Gustave Flaubert was an influential French writer widely considered one of the greatest novelists in Western literature. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary, for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.

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Births

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Deaths

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