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
I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!
One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.
The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
The future is the worst thing about the present.
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!
Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.
Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
Adultery ... could be as banal as marriage.
Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible.
The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
Talent is a long patience.
Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.