Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert, French author

Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 – May 8, 1880) was a French novelist.

Sourced

One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.
- Letter to Madame Louise Colet (August 12, 1846)

Quelle atroce invention que celle du bourgeois, n'est-ce pas?
- Translation: What a horrible invention, the bourgeois, don't you think?
- Letter to Madame Louise Colet (September 22, 1846)

One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.
- Letter to Madame Louise Colet (October 22, 1846)

Axion: hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.
- Letter to George Sand (May 10, 1867)

He is so corrupt that he would willingly pay for the pleasure of selling himself.
- Sentimental Education (1869)

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
- Letter to Maupassant (October 26, 1880)

Those who were beginning to grow old had an air of youth, while there was something mature in the faces of the young. In their unconcerned looks was the calm of passions daily satiated, and through all their gentleness of manner pierced that peculiar brutality, the result of a command of half- asy things, in which force is exercised and vanity amused—the management of thoroughbred horses and the society of loose women.
- Pt. I, Ch. 8

So far as Emma was concerned she did not ask herself whether she was in love. Love, she thought, was something that must come suddenly, with a great display of thunder and lightning, descending on one's life like a tempest from above, turning it topsy-turvy, whirling away one's resolutions like leaves and bearing one onward, heart and soul, towards the abyss. She never bethought herself how on the terrace of a house the rain forms itself into little lakes when the gutters are choked, and she was going on quite unaware of her peril, when all of a sudden she discovered- a crack in the wall!
- Pt. I, Ch. 4

As if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.
- Pt. II, Ch. 12

Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this period; she had that indefinable beauty that results from joy, from enthusiasm, from success, and that is only the harmony of temperament with circumstances. Her desires, her sorrows, the experience of pleasure, and her ever-young illusions, that had, as soil and rain and winds and the sun make flowers grow, gradually developed her, and she at length blossomed forth in all the plenitude of her nature.
- Pt. II, Ch. 12

We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes of on our hands.
- Pt. III, Ch. 6

Every bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet.
- Pt. III, Ch. 6

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.
- Pt. III, Ch. 8

There is always after the death of anyone a kind of stupefaction; so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign ourselves to believe in it.
- Pt. III, Ch. 9

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.

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

How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.

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

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.