Success Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Treating success as the prize is exactly how you start writing for the prize. Flaubert, the patron saint of obsessive craft, frames “success” as a side effect because he mistrusted anything that smells like applause. The line reads like a moral instruction, but it’s really a technical one: aim at the work itself, or the work will warp under the pressure of being liked.

The punch is in the grammar. “Consequence” makes success derivative, almost accidental, while “must not” turns the statement into a hard prohibition. Flaubert isn’t offering a comforting proverb; he’s drawing a boundary. If success becomes the goal, you begin optimizing for the market’s short-term signals: trend, taste, safety, recognizability. You choose what sells over what’s true, what flatters over what reveals. For a novelist who spent years chiseling sentences and took impersonal style as a kind of ethic, that’s not merely compromise; it’s corruption.

Context matters: mid-19th-century France is a machine for reputations, prizes, salons, scandal. Flaubert’s own career proved how messy “success” is. Madame Bovary made him notorious, then celebrated; it also landed him in court. So he knew fame arrives wearing multiple masks: acclaim, misunderstanding, moral panic, commodification. By demoting success to consequence, he keeps the artist’s attention where it can actually control something: the rigor of the page.

The subtext is a warning for any creative economy: when success is the target, the target starts writing back.