Quote

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

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
Geometry
Precise
Subject
Subjects
Poetry

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Image
Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
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
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
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
By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
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
After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
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
Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Reveal art conceal the artist.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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
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
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
The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I have dreamed much and have done very little.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
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
Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
Gustave Flaubert