Top 71 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.