To be stupid and selfish and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness,
though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.
– Gustave Flaubert
A man has missed something if he has never left a brothel at dawn feeling like throwing
himself into the river out of sheer disgust with life.
– Gustave Flaubert
Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this.
– Gustave Flaubert
A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.
– Gustave Flaubert
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
– Gustave Flaubert
The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on
white linens.
– 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
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
– Gustave Flaubert
A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
– Gustave Flaubert
One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
– Gustave Flaubert
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
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
– Gustave Flaubert
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
Exuberance is better than taste.
– Gustave Flaubert
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
– Gustave Flaubert
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
– Gustave Flaubert
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.
– Gustave Flaubert
I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its
high priests.
– Gustave Flaubert
The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
– Gustave Flaubert
A memory is a beautiful thing, it’s almost a desire that you miss.
– Gustave Flaubert
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
– Gustave Flaubert
Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my
opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.
– Gustave Flaubert
I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
– Gustave Flaubert
The future is the worst thing about the present.
– Gustave Flaubert
By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream.
– Gustave Flaubert
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by
the bourgeois.
– Gustave Flaubert
Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
– Gustave Flaubert
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
– Gustave Flaubert
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
– Gustave Flaubert
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
– Gustave Flaubert
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
Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
– Gustave Flaubert
Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
– Gustave Flaubert
One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which
attracts us.
– Gustave Flaubert
One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon
when he cannot be a soldier.
– Gustave Flaubert
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
– Gustave Flaubert
It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between
people are difficult to find.
– Gustave Flaubert
Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.
– Gustave Flaubert
What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
– Gustave Flaubert
What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is
that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of
slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life
and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures.
– Gustave Flaubert
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
– Gustave Flaubert
Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.
– Gustave Flaubert
The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible
nowhere.
– Gustave Flaubert
You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a
work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.
– Gustave Flaubert
One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
– Gustave Flaubert
Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.
– Gustave Flaubert
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
– Gustave Flaubert
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
I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
– Gustave Flaubert
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to
the Pharaohs.
– Gustave Flaubert
We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
– Gustave Flaubert
All one’s inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as
geometry.
– Gustave Flaubert
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
– Gustave Flaubert
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers
refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
– Gustave Flaubert
The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
– Gustave Flaubert
I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
– Gustave Flaubert
Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
– Gustave Flaubert
Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his
soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides;
this is how we keep ourselves on the common level.
– Gustave Flaubert
There is no truth. There is only perception.
– Gustave Flaubert
Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
– Gustave Flaubert
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
– 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