Top 100 Flaubert's Quotes
#1. Flaubert's famous sentence, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" ("Madame Bovary, she is me"), in reality means, " Madame Bovary, c'est nous" ("Madame Bovary, she is us"), in our modern incapacity to live a "good-enough" life.
Sophie Barthes
#2. 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
#3. Madame Bovary is timeless. It is not just about the female condition in France in the 1840s. It's not a simple cautionary tale. Emma is more than a character; she gives us an insight into human nature. With Emma, we are diving into the complexities of Flaubert's psyche.
Sophie Barthes
#4. The power of 'Madame Bovary' stems from Flaubert's determination to render each object of his scrutiny exactly as it looks, or sounds or smells or feels or tastes.
Kathryn Harrison
#5. In Flaubert's eyes, that only entirely illiterate and uneducated Frenchmen now stood a chance of being able to think properly:
Alain De Botton
#6. I felt like Frederic Moreau arriving late and uninvited at Monsieur Dambreuse's elite salon in Flaubert's Sentimental Education - a
Chris Kraus
#7. In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it ... a wild book.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
#8. What's improper about it?" retorted the clerk. "Everybody does it in Paris!" It was an irresistible and conclusive argument.
Gustave Flaubert
#9. Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.
Gustave Flaubert
#10. We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity ... I think that's what being really human means.
Gustave Flaubert
#11. A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
Gustave Flaubert
#13. One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
Gustave Flaubert
#14. I wouldn't mind a bit seeing all civilization crumble like a mason's scaffolding before the building was finished
Gustave Flaubert
#15. Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.
Truman Capote
#16. I'm dazzled by your facility. In ten days you'll have written six stories! I don't understand it ... I'm like one of those old aqueducts: there's so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.
Gustave Flaubert
#17. Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.
Julian Barnes
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Come, let's be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.
Gustave Flaubert
#21. Cheer up,' said the captain's son. 'Life is long, and we are young.
Gustave Flaubert
#22. One event sometimes had infinite ramifications and could change the whole settings of a person's life.
Gustave Flaubert
#23. Charles' conversation was as flat as a street pavement, on which everybody's ideas trudged past, in their workaday dress, provoking no emotion, no laughter, no dreams.
Gustave Flaubert
#24. Isn't the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment's desolate attic?
Julian Barnes
#25. They took each other's advice, opened one book, went over to another, then did not know what to decide when opinions diverged so widely.
Gustave Flaubert
#26. Oh, if somewhere there were a being strong and handsome, a valiant heart, passionate and sensitive at once, a poet's spirit in an angel's form, a lyre with strings of steel, sounding sweet-sad epithalamiums to the heavens, then why should she not find that being?
Gustave Flaubert
#27. My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.
Gustave Flaubert
#28. 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
#30. On the Place she met Lestivoudois on his way back, for, in order not to shorten his day's labour, he preferred interrupting his work, then beginning it again, so that he rang the Angelus to suit his own convenience. Besides, the ringing over a little earlier warned the lads of catechism hour.
Gustave Flaubert
#31. Travel, leave everything, copy the birds. The home is one of civilization's sadnesses.
Gustave Flaubert
#32. But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.
Gustave Flaubert
#33. It seems that the people of Oran are like that friend of Flaubert who, on the point of death, casting a last glance at the irreplaceable earth, exclaimed: Close the window, it's too beautiful.
Albert Camus
#34. 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
#35. Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.
Gustave Flaubert
#36. Antiquite . en tout ce qui s'y rapporte: Est poncif, embe tant! etc. Antiquity. And everything to do with it, cliche d and boring.
Gustave Flaubert
#37. All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
#38. Have you ever had the experience of finding in a book some vague idea that's already occurred to you, some obscure image that comes back to you from the depths of your mind, or a perfect expression of your most subtle feelings?
Gustave Flaubert
#39. Without moving, you walk through lands you imagine you can see, and your thoughts, weaving in and out of the story, delight in the details or follow the outlines of the adventures. You merge with the character; you think you're the one whose heart is beating so hard within the clothes he's wearing.
Gustave Flaubert
#40. 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
#41. Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
Gustave Flaubert
#42. Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.
Gustave Flaubert
#43. The more flowery a person's speech ... the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed.
Gustave Flaubert
#44. One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
Gustave Flaubert
#45. Well, quite softly, one day following another, a spring on a winter, and an autumn after a summer, this wore away, piece by piece, crumb by crumb; it passed away, it is gone, I should say it has sunk; for something always remains at the bottom as one would say - a weight here, at one's heart.
Gustave Flaubert
#46. 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
#47. You should have a heart in order to feel other people's hearts.
Gustave Flaubert
#48. We aren't there yet,' said Bouvard.
Let's hope not,' said Pecuchet.
Gustave Flaubert
#49. There's a fundamental stupidity in mankind which is as eternal as life itself.
Gustave Flaubert
#50. What an awful thing life is, isn't it? It's like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.
Gustave Flaubert
#51. The passionate desire to conclude is one of humanity's most pernicious and sterile manias.
Flaubert
#53. The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft.
Gustave Flaubert
#54. The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror
Gustave Flaubert
#56. [The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
Gustave Flaubert
#57. 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
#58. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.
(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)
Gustave Flaubert
#60. It seems to me ... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions ... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
Gustave Flaubert
#61. His heart was flooded with immense love, and as he gazed on her he could feel his mind growing numb.
Gustave Flaubert
#62. 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
#63. It seemed to her that certain parts of the world must produce happiness as they produced peculiar plants which will flourish nowhere else.
Gustave Flaubert
#64. A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Gustave Flaubert
#66. Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?
Gustave Flaubert
#70. Why was it? Who drove you to it?'
She replied, 'It had to be, my dear!'
'Weren't you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could!'
'Yes, that is true - you are good - you.
Gustave Flaubert
#71. Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase.
Gustave Flaubert
#72. If you want to be happy, it is necessary not to be too intelligent.
Gustave Flaubert
#73. 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
#74. Sorrow rushed into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in abandoned manor houses.
Gustave Flaubert
#75. The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
Gustave Flaubert
#76. In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed.
Gustave Flaubert
#77. To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
Gustave Flaubert
#78. 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
#79. And he was beginning to feel that discouragement which is engendered by a life of repetition, when no interest guides nor expectation sustains it.
Gustave Flaubert
#81. I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.
Robert Stone
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. It's hard to communicate anything exactly and that's why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
Gustave Flaubert
#86. I kept my door more securely locked than ever and passed the time with foreign novels. Since Balzac was Luo's favourite I put him to one side, and with the ardour and earnestness of my eighteen years I fell in love with one author after another: Flaubert, Gogol, Melville, and even Romain Rolland.
Dai Sijie
#87. Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again.
Gustave Flaubert
#88. Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
Gustave Flaubert
#89. And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?
Gustave Flaubert
#90. I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that.
Julian Barnes
#91. There is a place they call La Pature, on the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset.
Gustave Flaubert
#92. I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing".
Emil Cioran
#93. She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes.
Gustave Flaubert
#94. Surely it could not have been a dove God had chosen to speak through, since doves could not talk.
Gustave Flaubert
#95. What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.
Gustave Flaubert
#96. 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
#99. What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.
Gustave Flaubert
