Gustave Flaubert quotes

Be steady and well-oriented in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.
- Gustave Flaubert

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

Talent is nothing but long patience.
- Gustave Flaubert

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!.
- Gustave Flaubert

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
- Gustave Flaubert

By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.
- Gustave Flaubert

I have dreamed much and have done very little.
- Gustave Flaubert

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.
- Gustave Flaubert

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
- Gustave Flaubert

One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
- Gustave Flaubert

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity, I think that’s what being really human means.
- Gustave Flaubert

There is no truth. There is only perception.
- Gustave Flaubert

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
- Gustave Flaubert

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

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.
- Gustave Flaubert

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
- Gustave Flaubert

To be simple is no small matter.
- Gustave Flaubert

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!
- Gustave Flaubert

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
- Gustave Flaubert

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
- Gustave Flaubert

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.
- Gustave Flaubert