Gustave Flaubert Quotes

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

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

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

“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women”

“Read in order to live.”

“To be simple is no small matter.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

“One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.”

“Self-possession depends on its environment.”

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

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

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

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

“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!"”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“There is no 'true.”

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

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

“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!”