Gustave Flaubert Quotes

• 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

• 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

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

  Gustave Flaubert

• Madame Bovary is myself.

  Gustave Flaubert

• Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

  Gustave Flaubert

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

  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

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

  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

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

  Gustave Flaubert

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

  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

• I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

  Gustave Flaubert

• I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.

  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

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

  Gustave Flaubert

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

  Gustave Flaubert

• Exuberance is better than taste.

  Gustave Flaubert

• 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

• 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

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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