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Gustave Flaubert: 196 quotes11 likes

“Self-possession depends on its environment.”

Madame Bovary

“The man is nothing, the work — all. (December 1875)”

L'homme n'est rien, l'oeuvre – tout
Slightly misquoted in "The Red-Headed League" by Arthur Conan Doyle as L'homme c'est rien – l'oeuvre c'est tout.
Correspondence, Letters to George Sand

“One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.”

Gustave Flaubert

12 August 1846
Correspondence, Letters to Madame Louise Colet

“He is so corrupt that he would willingly pay for the pleasure of selling himself.”

Gustave Flaubert book Sentimental Education

Pt. 3, Ch. 3
Sentimental Education (1869)

“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”

Gustave Flaubert

William James, in The Will to Believe (1897)
Misattributed

“The brazen arms were working more quickly. They paused no longer. Every time that a child was placed in them the priests of Moloch spread out their hands upon him to burden him with the crimes of the people, vociferating: "They are not men but oxen!" and the multitude round about repeated: "Oxen! oxen!"”

Gustave Flaubert book Salammbô

The devout exclaimed: "Lord! Eat!"
Salammbô (1862), Ch. 13 : Moloch

“Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. (8 September 1871)”

Gustave Flaubert

Correspondence, Letters to George Sand

“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.”

Gustave Flaubert

14 June 1853
Correspondence, Letters to Madame Louise Colet

“What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.”

Gustave Flaubert

To Guy de Maupassant (October 26, 1880)
Correspondence

“What a horrible invention, the bourgeois, don't you think? (22 September 1846)”

Gustave Flaubert

Correspondence, Letters to Madame Louise Colet

“Axiom: hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom. But I include in the word bourgeois, the bourgeois in blouses as well the bourgeois in coats. It is we and we alone, that is to say the literary men, who are the people, or to say it better: the tradition of humanity.”

Gustave Flaubert

Source: Correspondence, Letters to George Sand, 10 May 1867

“One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.”

Gustave Flaubert

22 October 1846
Correspondence, Letters to Madame Louise Colet

“Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.”

Gustave Flaubert book Sentimental Education

Rien n'est humiliant comme de voir les sots réussir dans les entreprises où l'on échoue.
Pt. 1, Ch. 5
Sentimental Education (1869)

“There is no 'true.”

Gustave Flaubert

There are merely ways of perceiving truth.
Quoted in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1857-1880, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), xii.
Correspondence

“Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”

Gustave Flaubert

June 1857
Correspondence, Letters to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie

“What a horrible invention, the bourgeois, don't you think?”

Gustave Flaubert

22 September 1846
Correspondence, Letters to Madame Louise Colet

“Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.”

Gustave Flaubert

“Without ideality, there is no grandeur; without grandeur there is no beauty. Olympus is a mountain. The most effective monument will always be the Pyramids. Exuberance is better than taste; the desert is better than a streetpavement, and a savage is surely better than a hairdresser!”

Gustave Flaubert book Sentimental Education

Source: Sentimental Education (1869), Pt. 1, Ch. 4; the most famous portion of this statement is "Exuberance is better than taste..." [Mieux vaut l'exubérance que le goût.]