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
Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.
DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'
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.
By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.
He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.
There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.
Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.
It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.