Quote

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

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
Finally
Inner
Conscience
Calls
Literature
Vanity
Everything
Firm
Come
Basis
Bases
Conviction

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Image
Iced champagne was served, and the feel of the cold wine in her mouth gave Emma a shiver that ran over her from head to toe.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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
Image
I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
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
And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
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
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
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
Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!
Gustave Flaubert
Image
But an infinity of passions can be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a tiny space.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
Gustave Flaubert