Quote

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

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
Men
Critic
Soldier
Critics
Becomes
Artist
Art
Cannot
Informer
Way
Informers

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Image
There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
Gustave Flaubert
Image
And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'
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
Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
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
He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
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
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Gustave Flaubert