Top 100 Gustave Flaubert Quotes
#1. The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.
Gustave Flaubert
#3. The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.
Gustave Flaubert
#4. After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
Gustave Flaubert
#5. Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.
Gustave Flaubert
#6. Surely it could not have been a dove God had chosen to speak through, since doves could not talk.
Gustave Flaubert
#7. He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.
Gustave Flaubert
#8. It's hard to communicate anything exactly and that's why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
Gustave Flaubert
#9. There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
Gustave Flaubert
#10. How wonderful to find in living creatures the same substance as those which make up minerals. Nevertheless they felt a sort of humiliation at the idea that their persons contained phosphorous like matches, albumen like white of egg, hydrogen gas like street lamps.
Gustave Flaubert
#12. But I have gone back to work; I try to intoxicate myself with ink, the way others intoxicate themselves with brandy, so as to forget the public disasters and my private sorrows.
Gustave Flaubert
#14. Their separation was becoming intolerable. "I would rather die!" said Emma. She was writhing in his arms, weeping. "Adieu! adieu! When shall I see you again?
Gustave Flaubert
#17. Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.
Gustave Flaubert
#18. Iced champagne was served, and the feel of the cold wine in her mouth gave Emma a shiver that ran over her from head to toe.
Gustave Flaubert
#19. Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul's possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level
Gustave Flaubert
#20. I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.
Gustave Flaubert
#21. Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea
of an ideal.
Gustave Flaubert
#22. The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
Gustave Flaubert
#24. This was how they wished they had been: each was creating an ideal into which he was now fitting his past life.
Gustave Flaubert
#25. Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.
Gustave Flaubert
#27. Come, let's be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.
Gustave Flaubert
#28. And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
Gustave Flaubert
#29. Standing side by side, on some rising ground, they felt, as they drank in the air, the pride of a life more free penetrating into the depths of their souls, with a superabundance of energy, a joy which they could not explain.
Gustave Flaubert
#30. As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.
Gustave Flaubert
#32. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
Gustave Flaubert
#33. For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.
Gustave Flaubert
#34. I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world.
Gustave Flaubert
#35. The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
Gustave Flaubert
#36. She devoutly put away in her drawers her beautiful dress, down to the satin shoes whose soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor. Her heart was like these. In its friction against wealth something had come over it that could not be effaced.
Gustave Flaubert
#37. One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
Gustave Flaubert
#38. A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.
Gustave Flaubert
#39. Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her - the opportunity, the courage.
Gustave Flaubert
#40. The new delight of independence soon made his loneliness bearable.
Gustave Flaubert
#42. Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.
Gustave Flaubert
#43. Speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.
Gustave Flaubert
#44. Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
Gustave Flaubert
#46. In her desire, she confused the sensual pleasures of luxury with the joys of the heart, elegance of manner with delicacy of feeling.
Gustave Flaubert
#47. It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.
Gustave Flaubert
#48. I refuse to consider Art a drain-pipe for passion, a kind of chamberpot, a slightly more elegant substitute for gossip and confidences. No, no! Genuine poetry is not the scum of the heart.
Gustave Flaubert
#49. You'll always have to deal with bastards, being lied to, deceived, slandered and ridiculed, but that's to be expected and you must thank heaven when you meet the exception.
Gustave Flaubert
#51. Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.
Gustave Flaubert
#52. One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
Gustave Flaubert
#53. The more flowery a person's speech ... the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed.
Gustave Flaubert
#54. The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
Gustave Flaubert
#55. By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream
Gustave Flaubert
#56. What exasperated her was that Charles seemed to have no notion of her torment. His conviction that he was making her happy struck her as impudent imbecility, his uxorious complacency as ingratitude.
Gustave Flaubert
#57. Be selfish, stupid and have good health. But if stupidity is lacking, then all is lost.
Flaubert's dictum for getting through life unscathed.
Gustave Flaubert
#58. What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books.
Gustave Flaubert
#59. 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.
Gustave Flaubert
#60. He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
Gustave Flaubert
#61. Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
Gustave Flaubert
#62. One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being.
Gustave Flaubert
#63. But what was making her unhappy? Where was the extraordinary catastrophe that had wrecked her life?She raised her head and looked around, as though trying to find the cause of her suffering.
Gustave Flaubert
#65. There is always after the death of anyone a kind of stupefaction; so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign ourselves to believe in it.
Gustave Flaubert
#66. So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!
Gustave Flaubert
#67. Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Gustave Flaubert
#68. The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves.
Gustave Flaubert
#69. Future joys are like tropical shores; like a fragrant breeze, they extend their innate softness to the immense inland world of past experience, and we are lulled by this intoxication into forgetting the unseen horizons beyond.
Gustave Flaubert
#70. I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
Gustave Flaubert
#72. I'm the sort of man who's doomed to be a failure and I'll go to my grave without ever knowing whether I was real gold or just tinsel!
Gustave Flaubert
#74. It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don't get horny enough to actually to father them.
Gustave Flaubert
#75. You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
Gustave Flaubert
#76. As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
Gustave Flaubert
#78. The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Gustave Flaubert
#80. What was it that thus set so far asunder the morning of the day before yesterday and the evening of to-day?
Gustave Flaubert
#82. It is a wonderful thing, how no one will allow anyone to live as he likes.
Gustave Flaubert
#83. Lively once, expansive and affectionate, in growing older she had become (after the fashion of wine that, exposed to air, turns to vinegar) ill-tempered, grumbling, irritable. She
Gustave Flaubert
#84. Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex ...
Gustave Flaubert
#85. She only wished to lean on something more solid than love.
Gustave Flaubert
#86. Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.
Gustave Flaubert
#87. Her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
Gustave Flaubert
#88. I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter
Gustave Flaubert
#90. By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.
Gustave Flaubert
#91. The citadel of Machaerus rose east of the Dead Sea on a basalt Peak shaped like a cone, girdled by four deep valleys; two about its sides, one in front, and the fourth behind.
Gustave Flaubert
#92. Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
Gustave Flaubert
#93. The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.
Gustave Flaubert
#95. Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom
Gustave Flaubert
#96. How oft the warmth of the sun above
Makes a pretty young girl dream of love.
Gustave Flaubert
#97. Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expected to find it.
Gustave Flaubert
#98. 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.
Gustave Flaubert
#99. The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.
Gustave Flaubert
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