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 rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded.
It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.
Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.
It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.
What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?
I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.