Gustave Flaubert

Quotes

• “The brazen arms were working more quickly. They paused no longer. Every time that a child was placed in them the priests...”
• “For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act. They are hampered by mistrust of them...”
• “I see now, looking at this little book, November, by Flaubert, so many of the themes that he was going to explore so won...”
• “Without ideality, there is no grandeur; without grandeur there is no beauty. Olympus is a mountain. The most effective m...”
• “Axiom: hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom. But I include in the word bourgeois, the bourgeois in blouses...”
• “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...”
• “I, too, had my nervous period, my sentimental period, and I still bear its mark, like a galley slave, on my neck. With m...”
• “J'ai eu, aussi, moi, mon époque nerveuse, mon époque sentimentale, et j'en porte encore, comme un galérien, la marque au...”
• “Émile Zola, La Tribune (28 November 1869), in Oeuvres complètes, X: Oeuvres critiques 1 (1968), p. 918, quoted in Robert...”
• “Madame Bovary is written entirely according to the system of tanka. Flaubert wrote it so slowly and painstakingly, becau...”
• “The novel's outside world, if well enough created, does live on, when you look at the world of Jane Austen, Flaubert, Tu...”
• “I want to think that every character is a little-I guess like Flaubert saying "Emma Bovary, c'est moi"-that I am the cha...”
• “Quoted in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1857-1880, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univers...”
• “[L'Éducation sentimentale displays Flaubert's] nervous analysis of the smallest facts, a notation of life that is both m...”
• “Pt. 1, Ch. 4; the most famous portion of this statement is "Exuberance is better than taste..." [Mieux vaut l'exubérance...”
• “The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but neve...”
• “To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is...”
• “The Martyr of Letters', essay on The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, F. L. Lucas, Studies French and English (1934), pp. 24...”
• “One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.”
• “Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”
• “Slightly misquoted in "The Red-Headed League" by Arthur Conan Doyle as L'homme c'est rien - l'oeuvre c'est tout.”
• “Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d'être violent et original dans vos œuvres.”
• “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
• “Jean-Paul Sartre, "Marxism and Subjectivity", 1961 lecture published in New Left Review (July-August 2014)”
• “Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.”
• “Albert Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert 1821-1880. Sa Vie - Ses Romans - Son Style (1922), pp. 151-152”
• “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”
• “The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.”
• “Tout le rêve de la démocratie est d'élever le prolétaire au niveau de bêtise du bourgeois.”
• “Rien n'est humiliant comme de voir les sots réussir dans les entreprises où l'on échoue.”
• “Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.”
• “Flaubert 'Bookweb' on literary website The Ledge, with suggestions for further reading”
• “Flaubert entry at the Johns Hopkins University Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism”
• “Flaubert's works: text, concordances and frequency list at IntraText Digital Library”
• “One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.”
• “He is so corrupt that he would willingly pay for the pleasure of selling himself.”
• “As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”
• “C'était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d'Hamilcar.”
• “It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar.”
• “To Gertrude Tennant (December 25, 1876) (Correspondence v4, p. 280)”
• “There is no 'true'. There are merely ways of perceiving truth.”
• “Notre ignorance de l'histoire nous fait calomnier notre temps.”
• “Quelle atroce invention que celle du bourgeois, n'est-ce pas?”
• “Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.”
• “What a horrible invention, the bourgeois, don't you think?”
• “What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.”
• “Tout le monde, par excès de terreur, devenait brave.”
• “In their extremity of terror all became brave.”
• “Pt. 1, Ch. 4 (ed. Dora Knowlton Ranous, 1922)”
• “Site of the Centre Flaubert at Rouen (French)”