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Authors & Writing
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It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes. When I brood over these marvelous pleasures I have enjoyed, I would be tempted to offer God a prayer of thanks if I knew he could hear me. Praised may he be for not creating me a cotton merchant, a vaudevillian, or a wit.
-Gustave Flaubert
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The author should be in his work like God is in the universe--present everywhere and visible nowhere.
L'auteur dans son oeuvre doit etre comme Dieu dans l'univers, present partout et visible nulle part.
-Gustave Flaubert
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Criticism
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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
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History
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
-Gustave Flaubert
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Humility
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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
-Gustave Flaubert
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Identity
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One mustn
-Gustave Flaubert, Trans. by William G. Allen. Pens
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Ignorance & Stupidity
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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.
-Gustave Flaubert
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Language
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Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
-Gustave Flaubert
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Poetry
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All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
-Gustave Flaubert
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Reading
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Read in order to live.
-Gustave Flaubert
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Work
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Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
-Gustave Flaubert
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Books by and about Gustave Flaubert