Quote

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

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
Ignorance
Causes
Literature
Times
History
Slander

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Image
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
Image
Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
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
Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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
Image
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
L'Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I have dreamed much and have done very little.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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