Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Greatest
Literature
Punches
Force
Characteristic
Energy
Characteristics
Given
Judge
Book
Goodness
Believe
Judging
Genius

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Image
(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
You can't find the soul with a scalpel.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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
Image
The future is the worst thing about the present.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
Gustave Flaubert
Image
As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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
Image
Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.
Gustave Flaubert