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Gustave Flaubert Quotes
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Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist. Highly influential, he has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary , his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert. Wikipedia  

✵ 12. December 1821 – 8. May 1880
Gustave Flaubert photo
Gustave Flaubert: 98 quotes11 likes

Gustave Flaubert Quotes

“Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.”

Gustave Flaubert

Source: The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830-1857

“For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

“Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?”

Gustave Flaubert

“She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

“Read in order to live.”

Gustave Flaubert

“To be simple is no small matter.”

Gustave Flaubert

Source: Selected Letters

“Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?”

Gustave Flaubert

“In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.”

Gustave Flaubert

“(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.”

Gustave Flaubert

Source: Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

“Self-possession depends on its environment.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary

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

Gustave Flaubert

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

“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.]