Top 450 Gustave Flaubert Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

— Gustave Flaubert

Featured in: Journey Quotes, Travel Quotes, Adventure Quotes

2. “There is no truth. There is only perception.”

— Gustave Flaubert

Featured in: Perspective Quotes

3. “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”

— Gustave Flaubert

4. “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

5. “Read in order to live.”

— Gustave Flaubert

Featured in: Reading Quotes

6. “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

7. “Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.”

— Gustave Flaubert

8. “Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.”

— Gustave Flaubert

9. “Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.”

— Gustave Flaubert

10. “Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.”

— Gustave Flaubert

11. “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

12. “Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”

— Gustave Flaubert

13. “I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world.”

— Gustave Flaubert

14. “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

15. “Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.”

— Gustave Flaubert

16. “The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.”

— Gustave Flaubert

17. “To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

— Gustave Flaubert

18. “Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible.”

— Gustave Flaubert

19. “There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

20. “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

21. “One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.”

— Gustave Flaubert

22. “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

23. “Ne lisez pas comme les enfants lisent, pour vous amuser, ni comme les ambitieux lisent, pour vous instruire. Non. Lisez pour vivre.”

— Gustave Flaubert

24. “The principal thing in this world is to keep one’s soul aloft.”

— 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. “Fabricando fit faber, age quod agis.”

— Gustave Flaubert

27. “It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.”

— Gustave Flaubert

28. “By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.”

— Gustave Flaubert

29. “Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.”

— Gustave Flaubert

30. “Tutto finisce, tutto passa, l’acqua scorre e il cuore dimentica.”

— Gustave Flaubert

31. “I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

32. “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.”

— Gustave Flaubert

33. “I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.”

— Gustave Flaubert

34. “You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.”

— Gustave Flaubert

35. “Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.”

— Gustave Flaubert

36. “You don’t make art out of good intentions.”

— Gustave Flaubert

37. “COLD. Healthier than heat.”

— Gustave Flaubert

38. “That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.”

— Gustave Flaubert

39. “Reveal art; conceal the artist.”

— Gustave Flaubert

40. “One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.”

— Gustave Flaubert

41. “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

42. “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

43. “Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.”

— Gustave Flaubert

44. “A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.”

— Gustave Flaubert

45. “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

46. “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! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.”

— Gustave Flaubert

47. “Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings, – a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.”

— Gustave Flaubert

48. “For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.”

— Gustave Flaubert

49. “Stupidity is an immovable object: you can’t try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

50. “I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.”

— Gustave Flaubert