Top 100 Gustave Flaubert Quotes
#1. 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
#2. How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
Gustave Flaubert
#4. She put him near the front door and a number of visitors were surprised that he would not answer to the name 'Polly', which is what all parrots were supposed to be called.
Gustave Flaubert
#5. Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert
#6. 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
#7. It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.
Gustave Flaubert
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. At last she sighed.
But the most wretched thing - is it not? - is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.
Gustave Flaubert
#11. I can't believe that our body, composed as it is of mud and shit and equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig or the crab-louse, contains anything pure and immaterial
Gustave Flaubert
#12. Thought is the greatest of pleasures - pleasure itself is only imagination - have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?
Gustave Flaubert
#13. Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.
Gustave Flaubert
#14. Isn't 'not to be bored' one of the principal goals of life?
Gustave Flaubert
#15. Pellerin used to read every available book on aesthetics, in the hope of discovering the true theory of Beauty, for he was convinced that once he had found it he would be able to paint masterpieces.
Gustave Flaubert
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.
Gustave Flaubert
#19. 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
#20. 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
#22. But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart.
Gustave Flaubert
#23. The mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the idea?
Gustave Flaubert
#24. Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,
a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
Gustave Flaubert
#27. How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.
Gustave Flaubert
#28. One event sometimes had infinite ramifications and could change the whole settings of a person's life.
Gustave Flaubert
#29. I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!
Gustave Flaubert
#31. A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier
Gustave Flaubert
#32. Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.
Gustave Flaubert
#33. I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.
Gustave Flaubert
#34. 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
#35. We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself!
Gustave Flaubert
#36. This was how they wished they had been: each was creating an ideal into which he was now fitting his past life.
Gustave Flaubert
#37. Pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall.
Gustave Flaubert
#38. He leaned against the writing desk and stayed there till nightfall, lost in sorrowful thoughts. After all, she had loved him.
Gustave Flaubert
#42. On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
Gustave Flaubert
#43. Bourgeois do not even suspect that we serve them our hearts. The race of gladiators has not died: every artist is one. He amuses the public with his afflictions.
Gustave Flaubert
#45. Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men.
Gustave Flaubert
#46. The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
Gustave Flaubert
#47. Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
Gustave Flaubert
#49. I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
Gustave Flaubert
#50. The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of
I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters
I live and breathe them.
Gustave Flaubert
#51. A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Gustave Flaubert
#52. What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.
Gustave Flaubert
#54. 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
#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
#66. The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror
Gustave Flaubert
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. If you want to be happy, it is necessary not to be too intelligent.
Gustave Flaubert
#72. 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
#73. Sorrow rushed into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in abandoned manor houses.
Gustave Flaubert
#74. The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
Gustave Flaubert
#75. 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
#76. It's hard to communicate anything exactly and that's why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
Gustave Flaubert
#77. I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
Gustave Flaubert
#78. Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
Gustave Flaubert
#79. Happy are they whose pens fly across the page; I myself hesitate, I falter. I become angry and fearful. My drive diminishes as my taste improves. I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well proportioned paragraph.
Gustave Flaubert
#80. 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
#83. Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
Gustave Flaubert
#84. 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
#85. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
Gustave Flaubert
#91. Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again.
Gustave Flaubert
#92. Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
Gustave Flaubert
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Surely it could not have been a dove God had chosen to speak through, since doves could not talk.
Gustave Flaubert
#98. What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.
Gustave Flaubert
#99. 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
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