Quote

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. I've never sought it (though I desire it) and seek it less and less.

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
Must
Sought
Never
Consequence
Seek
Though
Goal
Less
Success
Desire

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Image
I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?
Gustave Flaubert
Image
There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Stupidity is something unshakable nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
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
One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
The morality of art is in its very beauty.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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
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
Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
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
Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
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
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
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