Quote

To be simple is no small matter.

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
Matter
Small
Simple

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Image
The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.
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
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
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!
Gustave Flaubert
Image
All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I have dreamed much and have done very little.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Everything is there: the love of Art.
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
My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.
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
When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women
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 one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I have patience in all things - as far as the antechamber.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
Gustave Flaubert