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
Gustave Flaubert quotes about
She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.
You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.
The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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.
How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.
I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!
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.
(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.
Exuberance is better than taste.
It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.
Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.