Quote

Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?

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
Better
Admire
Thing
Follow
Work
Please
Like
Stupid
Public
Alone
Reads
Read
Besides
Ideas
Main

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Image
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
And he beholds the moon like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women
Gustave Flaubert
Image
The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
The future is the worst thing about the present.
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
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
There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
Gustave Flaubert
Image
L'Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Beautiful things spoil nothing.
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
Image
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
Gustave Flaubert
Image
We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
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
How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.
Gustave Flaubert