Gustave Flaubert Quotes About Literature

Quotes about: Literature

• 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.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Congratulations, Blessing, Accomplishment

• Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Dance, Stars, Long

  Madame Bovary pt. 1, ch. 12 (1857) (translation by Francis Steegmuller)

• Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Love, Literature, Ruins

  Gustave Flaubert, Francis Steegmuller (1980). “The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857”, p.83, Harvard University Press

• The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Book, Literature, Way

• Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Stupid, Literature, Unshakable

• 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.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Powerful, Artist, Literature

  Letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie, March 18, 1857.

• Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Ignorance, History, Literature

  Letter to George Sand, September 8, 1871.

• A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Missing You, Beautiful, Memories

• 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

  Travel, Tired, Literature

• 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.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Believe, Book, Judging

• One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Believe, Feelings

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Keys, Special, Literature

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Poetry, Literature, May

  Letter to Madame Louise Colet, August 14, 1853.

• The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Aggravation, Humanity, Literature

• Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Dog, Writing, Literature

• Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Beautiful, Animal, Men

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Doubt, Literature, Mania

• Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Literature, Politeness

  Gustave Flaubert, Francis Steegmuller (1980). “The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857”, p.220, Harvard University Press

• Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Birthday, Age, Today

• There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Views, Style

• The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Pride, Giving

• A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Writing, Men, Order

• I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Reading, Writing

• Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Stupid, Ignorance, Names

• Madame Bovary is myself.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Literature

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