For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTFor him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTBe regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTThe whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTReality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTWhat is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTNothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTThrough small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTWriting history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTEarth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTOn certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTOf all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTA thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTOur 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 FLAUBERTStupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTTo be simple is no small matter.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTTo be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT