Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubertwas an influential French novelist who was perhaps the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. 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 Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 December 1821
CityRouen, France
CountryFrance
The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.
I live absolutely like an oyster.
COLD. Healthier than heat.
Reveal art; conceal the artist.
We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.
Ah! In fact there are two moralities ... The petty one, the conventional one, the one devised by men, that keeps changing and bellows so loudly, making a commotion down here among us, in a perfectly pedestrian way ... But the other one, the eternal one, is all around and above us, like a landscape that surrounds us and the blue sky that gives us light.
We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself!
Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.
Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
Farming -- a vocation accursed of heaven, since one never saw a millionaire involved in it.
Everyone became brave from excess of terror.