Gustave Flaubert Quotes

• That which is beautiful is moral. That is all, nothing more.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• Latin. Man’s natural language. Spoils your style. Useful only for reading the inscriptions on public fountains. Beware of quotations in Latin: they always conceal something improper.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• Homer. Famous for his laugh. ‘Homeric laughter’. Never existed.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• Antiquity. And everything to do with it, cliched and boring.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing words, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called science.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• He was circling in his desire, like a prisoner in his dungeon.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• A novelist, in my opinion, does not have the right to give advice on the affairs of the world. He must, in his occupation, imitate God in His; that is to say, create and keep quiet.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• It is necessary to write for oneself, above all. It is the only hope of creating something beautiful.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• The charm of novelty, falling little by little like a robe, revealed the eternal monotony of passion, which has always the same forms and the same language.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• She believed that love should appear instantaneously, with the brilliance of a lightning storm.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• The courtesan is a myth. No woman has ever invented any new sensual pleasure.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• The most beautiful works are those that have the least content; the closer the expression is to the thought, the more indistinguishable the word from the content, the more beautiful is the work. I believe that the future of art lies in this direction.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• Someone is a critic when he cannot be an artist in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• You must not think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• The idea alone is eternal and necessary.

  Gustave Flaubert

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• I am as much Chinese as French.

  Gustave Flaubert

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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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