65 Gustave Flaubert Quotes On Success In Life

Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist. Highly influential, he has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, “in Flaubert, realism strives for formal perfection, so the presentation of reality tends to be neutral, emphasizing the values and importance of style as an objective method of presenting reality”. He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857), his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert. These Gustave Flaubert quotes will motivate you.

Best Gustave Flaubert Quotes

1. “One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
2. “Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
3. “I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
4. “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

5. “There is no truth. There is only perception.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

6. “The principal thing in this world is to keep one’s soul aloft.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
7. “I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
8. “Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
9. “I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports…. When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

10. “To be simple is no small matter.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

11. “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
12. “Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
13. “One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
14. “Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
15. “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” ~ Gustave Flaubert , Gustave Flaubert quotes on travel
16. “What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to arouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
17. “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
18. “By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

19. “The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

20. “Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
21. “Talent is nothing but long patience.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
22. “All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
23. “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
24. “I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
25. “The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

26. “The future is the worst thing about the present.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

27. “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
28. “There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it” ~ Gustave Flaubert
29. “To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
30. “After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
31. “One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

32. “Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

33. “We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep” ~ Gustave Flaubert
34. “I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan, and then comes back to life three days later!” ~ Gustave Flaubert
35. “Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
36. “I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

37. “Exuberance is better than taste.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

38. “Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain?” ~ Gustave Flaubert
39. “Mediocrity cherishes rules; as for me, I hate them; I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

40. “She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

41. “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
42. “One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
43. “I have dreamed much and have done very little.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
44. “Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
45. “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
46. “Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
47. “The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror” ~ Gustave Flaubert

48. “Read in order to live.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

49. “I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
50. “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
51. “What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!” ~ Gustave Flaubert
52. “You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
53. “A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

54. “For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

55. “The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
56. “One’s duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
57. “Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
58. “Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea–of an ideal.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
59. “Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

60. “The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

61. “A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
62. “Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
63. “My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else’s – monotonous, sensible, stupid.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
64. “The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
65. “What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright…Haven’t you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you’ve had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?” ~ Gustave Flaubert

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