Gustave Flaubert Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Gustave Flaubert.
Famous Quotes By Gustave Flaubert
Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can't stiffen up enough to create them. — Gustave Flaubert
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
What he then saw was like an apparition. She was seated in the middle of a bench all alone, or, at any rate, he could see no one, dazzled as he was by her eyes. — Gustave Flaubert
Love, she believed, must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightening - a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart with it off into the abyss. — Gustave Flaubert
This haze of blood must subside, the palace must collapse under the weight of the riches it conceals, the orgy must finish and the time come to awaken.
— Gustave Flaubert
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
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage. — Gustave Flaubert
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings. — Gustave Flaubert
Art, like the Jewish God, wallows in sacrifices. So tear yourself to pieces, mortify your flesh, roll in ashes, smear yourself with filth and spittle, wrench out your heart! You will be alone, your feet will bleed, an infernal disgust will be with you throughout your pilgrimage, what gives joy to others will give none to you, what to them are but pinpricks will cut you to the quick, and you will be lost in the hurricane with only beauty's faint glow visible on the horizon. — Gustave Flaubert
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs. — Gustave Flaubert
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
The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love. — Gustave Flaubert
as though the soul's abundance does not sometimes spill over in the most decrepit metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of their needs, their ideas, their afflictions, and since human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing-bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars. — Gustave Flaubert
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
Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments. — Gustave Flaubert
In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up. — Gustave Flaubert
Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting. — Gustave Flaubert
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
She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die. — Gustave Flaubert
Such killings were part of the natural order of things, an inevitable consequence of belonging to a royal household. — Gustave Flaubert
He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them. Emma was like any other of his mistresses, and the charm of novelty slipping off gradually like a peace of clothing revealed in his nakedness the eternal monotony of passion which always assumes the same form and uses the same languages. He could not perceive, this man of such broad experiences, the difference in feelings that might underlay similarities of expression. — Gustave Flaubert
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
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
What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures. — Gustave Flaubert
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
The most important thing is to keep the Soul aloft — Gustave Flaubert
The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens. — Gustave Flaubert
Death always brings with it a kind of stupefaction, so difficult is it for the human mind to realize and resign itself to the blank and utter nothingness. — Gustave Flaubert
Ah!" thought Rodolphe, turning very pale, "that was what she came for." At last he said with a calm air
"Dear madame, I have not got them."
He did not lie. If he had had them, he would, no doubt, have given them, although it is generally disagreeable to do such fine things: a demand for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and most destructive. — Gustave Flaubert
No, read in order to live. — Gustave Flaubert
I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly. — Gustave Flaubert
But that which most attracts the eye is opposite the Lion d'Or inn, the chemist's shop of Monsieur Homais. In the evening especially its argand lamp is lit up and the red and green jars that embellish his shop-front throw far across the street their two streams of colour; then across them as if in Bengal lights is seen the shadow of the chemist leaning over his desk. — Gustave Flaubert
Occasionally there came gusts of winds, breezes from the sea rolling in one sweep over the whole plateau of the Caux country, which brought even to these fields a salt freshness. The rushes, close to the ground, whistled; the branches trembled in a swift rustling, while their summits, ceaselessly swaying, kept up a deep murmur. — Gustave Flaubert
When you are some-'one', why would you wish to be some-'thing'? — Gustave Flaubert
In her enthusiasms she had always looked for something tangible: she had always loved church for its flowers, music for its romantic words, literature for its power to stir the passions and she rebelled before the mysteries of faith just as she grew ever more restive under discipline, which was antipathetic to her nature. — Gustave Flaubert
We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself! — Gustave Flaubert
Everything measurable passes, everything that can be counted has an end. Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears. — Gustave Flaubert
For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat. — Gustave Flaubert
The new delight of independence soon made his loneliness bearable. — Gustave Flaubert
COLD. Healthier than heat. — Gustave Flaubert
He had that incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for social conventions, that seduces or exasperates them. — Gustave Flaubert
What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright ... Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings? — Gustave Flaubert
Her great desire, in fact, was to have something more solid, more tangible than love to rely upon. — Gustave Flaubert
I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all — Gustave Flaubert
I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen. — Gustave Flaubert
One event sometimes had infinite ramifications and could change the whole settings of a person's life. — Gustave Flaubert
If we knew how our body is made, we wouldn't dare move. — Gustave Flaubert
Accustomed to the calm aspects of things, she turned, instead, toward the more tumultuous. She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. She needed to derive from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immediate gratification of her heart, - being by temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions and not landscapes. — Gustave Flaubert
Human Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity. — Gustave Flaubert
Travel, leave everything, copy the birds. The home is one of civilization's sadnesses. — Gustave Flaubert
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
Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless. — Gustave Flaubert
Sometimes I don't understand why my arms don't drop from my body with fatigue, why my brain doesn't melt away. I am leading an austere life, stripped of all external pleasure, and am sustained only by a kind of permanent frenzy, which sometimes makes me weep tears of impotence but never abates. I love my work with a love that is frantic and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly. Sometimes, when I am empty, when words don't come, when I find I haven't written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged down in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride that makes me pant after a chimera. A quarter of an hour later, everything has changed; my heart is pounding with joy. — Gustave Flaubert
Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it. — Gustave Flaubert
As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker. — Gustave Flaubert
Beautiful things spoil nothing. — Gustave Flaubert
Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions. — Gustave Flaubert
She was not happy
she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life
this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leaned? But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet's heart in an angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! How impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight. — Gustave Flaubert
Charles's conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone's ideas filed along it in their ordinary clothes, exciting no emotion, no laughter, no reverie. He had never been curious, he said, when he lived in Rouen, to go to the theater and see the actors from Paris. He did not know how to swim, or fence, or fire a pistol, and he could not explain to her, one day, a riding term she had come upon in a novel.
But shouldn't a man know everything, excel at a host of different activities, initiate you into the intensities of passion, the refinements of life, all its mysteries? Yet this man taught her nothing, knew nothing, wished for nothing. He thought she was happy; and she resented him for that settled calm, that ponderous serenity, that very happiness which she herself brought him. — Gustave Flaubert
[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
The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded. — Gustave Flaubert
I wouldn't mind a bit seeing all civilization crumble like a mason's scaffolding before the building was finished
— Gustave Flaubert
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use. — Gustave Flaubert
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
Then a faintness came over her; she recalled the Viscount who had waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this air an odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes the better to breathe it in. But — Gustave Flaubert
For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb. — Gustave Flaubert
After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again. — Gustave Flaubert
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
May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second! — Gustave Flaubert
... Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing! — Gustave Flaubert
The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the darkness, and sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips seemed to them deeper; their eyes, that they could hardly see, larger; and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied vibrations. — Gustave Flaubert
Emma was just like any other mistress; and the charm of novelty, falling down slowly like a dress, exposed only the eternal monotony of passion, always the same forms and the same language. — Gustave Flaubert
With my burned hand, I write about the nature of fire. — Gustave Flaubert
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. — Gustave Flaubert
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry. — Gustave Flaubert
An overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like. I want to know what they do, where they're from, their names, what they're thinking about at that moment, what they regret, what they hope for, their past loves, their current dreams ... and if they happen to be women (especially the young ones) then the urge becomes intense.
How quickly would you want to see her naked, admit it, and naked through to her heart. How you try to learn where she comes from, where she's going, why she's here and not elsewhere!
While letting your eyes wander all over her, you imagine love affairs for her, you ascribe her deep feelings. You think of the bedroom she must have, and a thousand things besides ... right down to the battered slippers into which she must slip her feet when she gets out of bed. — Gustave Flaubert
The public wants work which flatters its illusions. — Gustave Flaubert
How did you expect me to live without you? Once you've known happiness it's impossible to get used to not having it. I was desperate! I thought I should die! I'll tell you all about it, you'll see ... And you
you stayed away from me!' He had been carefully avoiding her for the past three years, out of that natural cowardice that characterises the stronger sex; and Emma went on, moving her head in winsome little gestures, more affectionate than an amorous cat. — Gustave Flaubert
His wife had been wild about him at first; she had treated him with an amorous servility that had turned him against her all the more. Vivacious, effusive, and very loving in the early days, over the years she had, like a stale wine that turns to vinegar, grown ill-humoured, waspish, and nervy. — Gustave Flaubert
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
One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being. — Gustave Flaubert
I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right. — Gustave Flaubert
He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height — Gustave Flaubert
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
Ah! In fact there are two moralities ... The petty one, the conventional one, the one devised by men, that keeps changing and bellows so loudly, making a commotion down here among us, in a perfectly pedestrian way ... But the other one, the eternal one, is all around and above us, like a landscape that surrounds us and the blue sky that gives us light. — Gustave Flaubert
Talent is long patience. — Gustave Flaubert
There, at the top of the table, alone amongst all these women, stooped over his ample plateful, with his napkin tied around his neck like a child, an old man sat eating, drips of gravy drbibbling gravy from him lips. His eyes were bloodshot and he had a little pigtail tied up with a black ribbon. This was the Marquis' father-in-law ... he had led a ... Read more tumultuous life of debauchery and duelling, of wagers made and women abducted, had squandered his fortune and terrified his whole family ... Emma's eyes kept coming back to this old man with the sagging lips, as though to something wonderfully majestic. He had lived at court and slept in the bed of a queen! — Gustave Flaubert
Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you. — Gustave Flaubert
One ought to know everything, to write. All of us scribblers are monstrously ignorant. If only we weren't lacking in stamina, what a rich field of ideas and similes we could tap! Books that have been the source of entire literatures, like Homer and Rabelais, contain the sum of all the knowledge of their times. They knew everything, those fellows, and we know nothing. — Gustave Flaubert
If you want to be happy, it is necessary not to be too intelligent. — Gustave Flaubert
Do you not know that there are souls constantly tormented? — Gustave Flaubert
Self-possession depends on its environment. — Gustave Flaubert
The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft. — Gustave Flaubert
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