Quote

I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

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
Decided
High
Literature
Call
Though
Hate
Even
Realism
Made
Priests

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Image
Antiquite . en tout ce qui s'y rapporte: Est poncif, embe tant! etc. Antiquity. And everything to do with it, cliche d and boring.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
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 sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Doesn't it seem to you, asked Madame Bovary, that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?
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
Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
To be simple is no small matter.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
[The artist] is like a pump he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
The future is the worst thing about the present.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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
Image
A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I have dreamed much and have done very little.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
Gustave Flaubert