Top 100 Gustave Quotes
#2. A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
Robert Hughes
#3. It wasn't easy to learn about Gustave LeBon. For being the father of such an enduring theory, almost nothing has been written about him. Only one man has ever tried to piece his life story together - Bob Nye, a professor of European intellectual history at Oregon State University.
Jon Ronson
#4. Well, you can say that about most anything, "it depends". Of course, it depends. - M. Gustave
Wes Anderson
#6. You see? There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant - (sighs deeply). Oh, fuck it.
-M. Gustave, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Wes Anderson
#7. To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
Gustave Flaubert
#8. 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
#9. One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.
Gustave Le Bon
#10. I believe neither in what I touch nor what I see. I only believe in what I do not see, and solely in what I feel.
Gustave Moreau
#11. The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
Gustave Flaubert
#12. Sorrow rushed into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in abandoned manor houses.
Gustave Flaubert
#13. 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
#14. The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
Gustave Le Bon
#15. If you want to be happy, it is necessary not to be too intelligent.
Gustave Flaubert
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things.
Gustave Courbet
#21. The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror
Gustave Flaubert
#23. A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Gustave Flaubert
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. His heart was flooded with immense love, and as he gazed on her he could feel his mind growing numb.
Gustave Flaubert
#27. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. [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
#33. 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
#35. What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.
Gustave Flaubert
#38. 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
#39. What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.
Gustave Flaubert
#40. Surely it could not have been a dove God had chosen to speak through, since doves could not talk.
Gustave Flaubert
#41. 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
#42. Instead of preparing men for life French schools solely prepare them to occupy public functions, in which success can be attained without any necessity for
self-direction or the exhibition of the least glimmer of personal initiative.
Gustave Le Bon
#43. 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
#44. Value change can change our pathetic capitulation to consumerism, which will help us psychologically as well as environmentally.
James Gustave Speth
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
Gustave Flaubert
#48. Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again.
Gustave Flaubert
#50. It's hard to communicate anything exactly and that's why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
Gustave Flaubert
#51. 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
#52. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
Gustave Flaubert
#58. Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.
Gustave De Molinari
#60. Women are always anxious to urge bachelors to matrimony; is it from charity, or revenge ?.
Louis Gustave Vapereau
#61. Materialism is toxic to happiness, and we are losing our connection to the natural world.
James Gustave Speth
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. You can take from an incomplete man what he knows in his field and by learning from many incomplete men, you can become a complete man
Gustave Norling
#65. If some of these answers seem radical or far-fetched today, then I say wait until tomorrow. Soon it will be abundantly clear that it is business as usual that is utopian, whereas creating something very new and different is a practical necessity.
James Gustave Speth
#66. Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
Gustave Flaubert
#67. I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
Gustave Flaubert
#70. I ought to be jealous of the tower. She is more famous than I am.
Gustave Eiffel
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.
Gustave Flaubert
#78. People lose sight of their dreams, only to hold tight their fears.
Gustave Geyer
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. When I am no longer controversial, I will no longer be important
Gustave Courbet
#85. Were it possible to induce the masses to adopt atheism, this belief would exhibit all the intolerant ardor of a religious sentiment, and in its exterior forms would soon become a cult.
Gustave Le Bon
#86. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian - that is, a creature acting by instinct.
Gustave Le Bon
#87. Thought is the greatest of pleasures - pleasure itself is only imagination - have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?
Gustave Flaubert
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. It is time in particular that prepares the opinions and beliefs of crowds, or at least the soil on which they will germinate.
Gustave Le Bon
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#98. How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
Gustave Flaubert
#99. Isn't 'not to be bored' one of the principal goals of life?
Gustave Flaubert
#100. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.
Gustave Le Bon
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