Quotes By 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 love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.
Gustave Flaubert
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
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
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
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
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
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
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
Gustave Flaubert
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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
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
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
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
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert