Quote

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

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
Literature
Birthday
Age
Ruins
Happiness
Catch
Today
Idiot
Would
Constitution
Like
Soon
Smallpox
Completely
Seventeen
Loved
Ruin

More quotes by 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
A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
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
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
After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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
Image
Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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
Image
The morality of art is in its very beauty.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.
Gustave Flaubert