Gustave Flaubert

“Non leggete, come fanno i bambini, per divertirvi, o, come fanno gli ambiziosi per istruirvi. No, leggete per vivere.”

— Gustave Flaubert

“The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.”

— Gustave Flaubert

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions.…

— Gustave Flaubert

“Ti se nadaš da čuješ nešto više o Viktoru Igou. Šta mogu da ti o njemu kažem ? To je čovek kao…

— Gustave Flaubert

“For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.”

— Gustave Flaubert

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

— Gustave Flaubert

Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that…

— Gustave Flaubert

When our eyes see our hands doing the work of our hearts, the circle of a thing derided is a thing dead;…

— Gustave Flaubert

“It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque,…

— Gustave Flaubert

What is glory? It is to have a lot of nonsense talked about you.

— Gustave Flaubert

“And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only…

— Gustave Flaubert

There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.

— Gustave Flaubert

“Accustomed to the calm aspects of things, she turned, instead, toward the more tumultuous. She loved the sea only for its storms,…

— Gustave Flaubert

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must…

— Gustave Flaubert

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

— Gustave Flaubert

Farming -- a vocation accursed of heaven, since one never saw a millionaire involved in it.

— Gustave Flaubert

“What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books.”

— Gustave Flaubert

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

— Gustave Flaubert

“What vast funds of indifference society possesses”

— Gustave Flaubert

L'Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.

— Gustave Flaubert

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh…

— Gustave Flaubert

“In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he…

— Gustave Flaubert

I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to…

— Gustave Flaubert

“One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ‘the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding…

— Gustave Flaubert

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external,…

— Gustave Flaubert