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
. . . human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.
Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity
By dint of railing at idiots you run the risk of becoming idiotic yourself
By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming idiotic oneself
Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
You can't find the soul with a scalpel.
Art is nothing without form.
One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world.
I do not like to "interest" the public with myself.
Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase.
And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.
The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.