Top 304 Quotes & Sayings by Gustave Flaubert

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French novelist Gustave Flaubert.

Last updated on April 14, 2025.

Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist. Highly influential, he has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flaubert, realism strives for formal perfection, so the presentation of reality tends to be neutral, emphasizing the values and importance of style as an objective method of presenting reality". He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857), his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert. On the occasion of Flaubert's 198th birthday, a group of researchers at CNRS published a neural language model under his name.

French - Novelist | December 12, 1821 - May 8, 1880

Source: Wikipedia

Exuberance is better than taste.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

Read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

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

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

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

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

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

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

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

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

Gustave Flaubert

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

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

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

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

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

Gustave Flaubert

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

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

A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

Gustave Flaubert

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

Gustave Flaubert

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

Gustave Flaubert

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

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

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

Gustave Flaubert

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.

Gustave Flaubert

There is no truth. There is only perception.

Gustave Flaubert

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

Gustave Flaubert

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

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 future is the worst thing about the present.

Gustave Flaubert

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

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

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

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

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

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Gustave Flaubert

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Gustave Flaubert

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

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

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

Top 304 Quotes & Sayings by Gustave Flaubert

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