Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubertwas an influential French novelist who was perhaps the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary, for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 December 1821
CityRouen, France
CountryFrance
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.
Exuberance is better than taste.
What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.
COLD. Healthier than heat.
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.
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
Je suis autant Chinois que Fran c° ais. I am as much Chinese as French.
A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.
Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.
DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'