Literary Birthday – 12 December – Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was born 12 December 1821, and died 8 May 1880.

Gustave Flaubert Quotes

1. Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
2. The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
3. To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
4. There is no truth. There is only perception.
5. It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.
6. Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
7. Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
8. Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
9. There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
10. 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.
11. Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.
12. Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
13. One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
14. One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
15. I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
16. You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.
17. One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
18. The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

Gustave Flaubert was a French writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in Western literature. He is best-known for writing Madame Bovary.

Image

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Nadar, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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