Gustave Flaubert quotes | Thousands Of Quotes

Search for quotes

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

Gustave Flaubert

Memories

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.

Gustave Flaubert

Love

Sense

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

Gustave Flaubert

End

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

I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

Gustave Flaubert

Hate

Realism

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.

Gustave Flaubert

Man

Pen

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

Gustave Flaubert

Traveling

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

Gustave Flaubert

Effort

Style