Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert (December 12 1821 – May 8 1880) was an influential French writer who was perhaps the leading exponent of literary realism of his country. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics.

Quotes

Salammbô (1862)

C'était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d'Hamilcar.
- It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar.
- Ch. 1: The Feast (tr. J. S. Chartres, 1886)

Tout le monde, par excès de terreur, devenait brave.
- In their extremity of terror all became brave.
- Ch. 6: Hanno (tr. J. S. Chartres, 1886)

The brazen arms were working more quickly. They paused no longer. Every time that a child was placed in them the priests of Moloch spread out their hands upon him to burden him with the crimes of the people, vociferating: "They are not men but oxen!" and the multitude round about repeated: "Oxen! oxen!" The devout exclaimed: "Lord! Eat!"
- Ch. 13: Moloch (tr. J. S. Chartres, 1886)

Sentimental Education (1869)

Don't talk to me about your hideous reality! What does it mean — reality? Some see things black, others blue — the multitude sees them brute-fashion. There is nothing less natural than Michael Angelo; there is nothing more powerful! The anxiety about eternal truth is a mark of contemporary baseness; and art will become, if things go on in that way, a sort of poor joke as much below religion as it is below poetry, and as much below politics as it is below business. You will never reach its end — yes, its end! — which is to cause within us an impersonal exaltation, with petty works, in spite of all your finished execution.
- Pt. 1, Ch. 4 (ed. Dora Knowlton Ranous, 1922)

Without ideality, there is no grandeur; without grandeur there is no beauty. Olympus is a mountain. The most effective monument will always be the Pyramids. Exuberance is better than taste; the desert is better than a streetpavement, and a savage is surely better than a hairdresser!
- Pt. 1, Ch. 4; the most famous portion of this statement is "Exuberance is better than taste..." [Mieux vaut l'exubérance que le goût.]

Rien n'est humiliant comme de voir les sots réussir dans les entreprises où l'on échoue.
- Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
- Pt. 1, Ch. 5

For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act. They are hampered by mistrust of themselves, daunted by the fear of giving offence; besides, deep feelings of affection are like respectable women; they are afraid of being found out and they go through life with downcast eyes.
- Pt. 2, Ch. 3

He is so corrupt that he would willingly pay for the pleasure of selling himself.
- Pt. 3, Ch. 3

Correspondence

Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d'être violent et original dans vos œuvres.
- Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
  - To Gertrude Tennant (December 25, 1876) (Correspondence v4, p. 280)

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
- To Guy de Maupassant (February 16, 1880)

There is no 'true'. There are merely ways of perceiving truth.
- Quoted in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1857-1880, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), xii.

Letters to Madame Louise Colet

My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my doubt.
- 8-9 August, 1846

One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.
- 12 August 1846

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
- 13 August 1846

Quelle atroce invention que celle du bourgeois, n'est-ce pas?
- What a horrible invention, the bourgeois, don't you think?
- 22 September 1846

One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.
- 22 October 1846

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
- 9 December 1852

The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.
- 11 December 1852

J'ai eu, aussi, moi, mon époque nerveuse, mon époque sentimentale, et j'en porte encore, comme un galérien, la marque au cou. Avec ma main brûlée j'ai le droit maintenant d'écrire des phrases sur la nature du feu.
- I, too, had my nervous period, my sentimental period, and I still bear its mark, like a galley slave, on my neck. With my burnt hand I now have the right to write some sentences on the nature of fire. (5-6 July 1852)

You can calculate]] the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it. (14 June 1853)

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
- 14 August 1853

Letters to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
- 18 March 1857

Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.
- June 1857

Letters to George Sand

Tout le rêve de la démocratie est d'élever le prolétaire au niveau de bêtise du bourgeois.
- The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.
- 4 or 5 October 1871

Notre ignorance de l'histoire nous fait calomnier notre temps.
- Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
- 8 September 1871

Axiom: hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom. But I include in the word bourgeois, the bourgeois in blouses as well the bourgeois in coats. It is we and we alone, that is to say the literary men, who are the people, or to say it better: the tradition of humanity.
- 10 May 1867

L'homme n'est rien, l'oeuvre – tout
- The man is nothing, the work — all.
- December 1875
- Slightly misquoted in "The Red-Headed League" by Arthur Conan Doyle as L'homme c'est rien – l'oeuvre c'est tout.

Misattributed

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
- William James, in The Will to Believe (1897)

Quotes about Flaubert

I see now, looking at this little book, November, by Flaubert, so many of the themes that he was going to explore so wonderfully later are just touched upon, he didn’t have the skill to carry them any further. And then, as his life went by, he followed them, he followed these dark tunnels.
- Nadine Gordimer Interview (2004)

When I was working on China Men, I remember reading a critic who was praising the great male writers, like Flaubert and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Henry James, who were able to write great women characters. I don't remember if they said women had done men in this way or not, but I remember thinking that to finish myself as a great artist I'd have to be able to create men characters. Along with that, I was thinking that I had to do more than the first person pronoun.
- 1991 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

Madame Bovary is written entirely according to the system of tanka. Flaubert wrote it so slowly and painstakingly, because he had to begin it anew after every fifth word.
- Osip Mandelstam THE NINETEENTH CENTURY translated into English in The complete critical prose (1997)

I want to think that every character is a little-I guess like Flaubert saying "Emma Bovary, c'est moi"-that I am the characters but the characters aren't me
- 1996 interview in Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee Edited by Bradley C. Edwards (2009)

Thus Flaubert has two quite different conceptions of himself. One is at the level of banal description, for example when he writes to his mistress Louise: ‘What am I? Am I intelligent or am I stupid? Am I sensitive or am I stolid? Am I mean or am I generous? Am I selfish or am I selfless? I have no idea, I suppose I am like everyone else, I waver between all these. . . .’ In other words, at this level he is completely lost. Why? Because none of these notions has any meaning in themselves. They only acquire a meaning from inter-subjectivity, in other words what I have called in the Critique the ‘objective spirit’ within which each member of a group or society refers to himself and appears to others, establishing relations of interiority between persons which derive from the same information or the same context.
Yet one cannot say that Flaubert did not have, at the very height of his activity, a comprehension of the most obscure origins of his own history. He once wrote a remarkable sentence: ‘You are doubtless like myself, you all have the same terrifying and tedious depths’—les mêmes profondeurs terribles et ennuyeuses. What could be a better formula for the whole world of psychoanalysis, in which one makes terrifying discoveries, yet which always tediously come to the same thing? His awareness of these depths was not an intellectual one. He later wrote that he often had fulgurating intuitions, akin to a dazzling bolt of lightning in which one simultaneously sees nothing and sees everything. Each time they went out, he tried to retrace the paths revealed to him by this blinding light, stumbling and falling in the subsequent darkness.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, "Marxism and Subjectivity", 1961 lecture published in New Left Review (July–August 2014)

La question archéologique, en ce qui concerne la restitution tentée dans Salammbô, est résolue depuis longtemps. La valeur archéologique de l'ouvrage est nulle, et Flaubert se trouve ici à cent coudées au-dessous d'Anacharsis lui-même. Son travail de recherches, assez considérable, ne lui a pas été inutile, loin de là, car il y était guidé par le sens du pittoresque, et savait tomber au juste sur tout ce qui devait lui permettre de belles images, mais la liste incomplète de ses erreurs a été suffisamment dressée pour que nous ne nous en laissions pas imposer par la lettre, d'ailleurs très verveuse, à Frœhner. Il n'en est pas de même du sens historique très remarquable dont il fait preuve. L'idée qu'il donne de Carthage est juste. Il a saisi avec exactitude les causes de sa grandeur et de sa faiblesse. Il les a exprimées dans un style historique d'une solidité, d'une netteté, d'une autorité parfaites. Ce style a pour corps la force intelligente, condensée et comme épigrammatique de Voltaire et de Montesquieu, et pour âme un souffle oratoire discipliné à la Chateaubriand.
- The archaeological question, as far as the reconstruction attempted in Salammbô is concerned, has long been resolved. The work has no archaeological value whatsoever, and Flaubert is here a hundred cubits below Anacharsis himself. His rather considerable research was not useless to him, far from it, for he was guided by a sense of the picturesque and knew how to pinpoint everything that would allow him to create beautiful images, but the incomplete list of his errors has been sufficiently compiled so that we should not be misled by Frœhner's otherwise very lively letter. The same cannot be said of the very remarkable historical sense he demonstrates. The idea he gives of Carthage is accurate. He has precisely grasped the causes of its greatness and its weakness. He has expressed them in a historical style of perfect solidity, clarity, and authority. This style has as its body the intelligent, condensed and almost epigrammatic force of Voltaire and Montesquieu, and as its soul a disciplined oratorical breath à la Chateaubriand.
- Albert Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert 1821–1880. Sa Vie – Ses Romans – Son Style (1922), pp. 151-152

The novel's outside world, if well enough created, does live on, when you look at the world of Jane Austen, Flaubert, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Proust! They're indelible.
- 1981 interview included in Conversations with Eudora Welty Edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw (1993)

[L'Éducation sentimentale displays Flaubert's] nervous analysis of the smallest facts, a notation of life that is both meticulous and alive.
- Émile Zola, La Tribune (28 November 1869), in Oeuvres complètes, X: Oeuvres critiques 1 (1968), p. 918, quoted in Robert Gildea, Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799–1914 (2008), p. 191

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