Gustave Flaubert Quotes

• Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

  Gustave Flaubert

• 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

• Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

  Gustave Flaubert

• Read much, but not many books.

  Gustave Flaubert

• Read in order to live.

  Gustave Flaubert

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

  Gustave Flaubert

• One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.

  Gustave Flaubert

• One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

  Gustave Flaubert

• One mustn’t always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

  Gustave Flaubert

• One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.

  Gustave Flaubert

• One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Topics in Life

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

  Gustave Flaubert

• 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

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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