Gustave Flaubert Quotes

When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from above?
Gustave Flaubert
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
Gustave Flaubert
Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.
Gustave Flaubert
Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.
Gustave Flaubert
Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
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
His eagerness had turned into a routine; he embraced her at the same time every day. It was a habit like any other, a favourite pudding after the monotony of dinner.
Gustave Flaubert
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
Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?
Gustave Flaubert
He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that’s for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I’ll be bound – you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters?
Gustave Flaubert
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
[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Gustave Flaubert
Speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.
Gustave Flaubert
Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fin
Gustave Flaubert
The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.
Gustave Flaubert
And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.
Gustave Flaubert
Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitterness.
Gustave Flaubert
Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
Gustave Flaubert
With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady’s album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.
Gustave Flaubert
I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country, that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black, has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.
Gustave Flaubert
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
Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.
Gustave Flaubert
Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.
Gustave Flaubert
Read in oreder to live
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
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
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
Gustave Flaubert
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.” ― Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.
Gustave Flaubert
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
Irony takes nothing away from pathos.
Gustave Flaubert
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon. She had no idea by what wind it would reach her, toward what shore it would bear her, or what kind of craft it would be – tiny boat or towering vessel, laden with heartbreaks or filled to the gunwhales with rapture. But every morning when she awoke she hoped that today would be the day; she listened for every sound, gave sudden starts, was surprised when nothing happened; and then, sadder with each succeeding sunset, she longed for tomorrow.
Gustave Flaubert
I believe in Supreme Being, a Creator, whoever he may be, it's of no importance to me, who put us here on earth to do our duty as citizens and fathers; but I don't need to go to church and kiss silver platters and dig into my pocket to fatten up a lot of humbugs who eat better than you or I do! Because he can be worshiped just as well in a wood, a field, or even just gazing at the ethereal vault, like the ancients.
Gustave Flaubert
...but now the love of Charles for Emma seemed to her a desertion from her tenderness, an encroachment upon what was hers, and she watched her son's happiness in sad silence, as a ruined man looks through the windows at people dining in his old house.
Gustave Flaubert
This sense of my own weakness and emptiness comforts me. I feel myself a mere speck of dust lost in space, yet I am part of that endless grandeur which envelopes me. I could never see why that should be cause for despair, since there could very well be nothing at all behind the black curtain.
Gustave Flaubert
Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker.
Gustave Flaubert
Has it ever happened to you," Léon went on, "to come across some vague idea of one's own in a book, some dim image that comes to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?
Gustave Flaubert
Some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her.
Gustave Flaubert
And on the endless dusty ribbon of the highway, on sunken roads vaulted over by branches, on paths between stands of grain that rose to his knees, the sun on his shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the night's bliss, his spirit at peace and his flesh content, he would ride on his way ruminating his happiness, like someone who keeps savoring, hours later, the fragrance of the truffles he has eaten for dinner.
Gustave Flaubert
Charles went to kiss her shoulder.-Leave me alone! she said, you're creasing my dress.
Gustave Flaubert
I have patience in all things – as far as the antechamber.
Gustave Flaubert
Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.
Gustave Flaubert
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
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
Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.
Gustave Flaubert
Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands.
Gustave Flaubert
But vilifying those we love always detaches us from them a little. We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
Gustave Flaubert
He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.
Gustave Flaubert
On days when it was too hot, they did not leave their room. The dazzling brilliance from outside plastered bars of light between the slats of the blinds. Not a sound in the village. Down below, on the sidewalk, no one. This spreading silence increased the tranquility of things. In the distance, the caulkers’ hammers tamped the hulls, and a heavy breeze brought the smell of tar.
Gustave Flaubert
I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.
Gustave Flaubert
And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.
Gustave Flaubert
One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ‘the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.
Gustave Flaubert
Frederick expected that he would have felt spasms of joy; but the passions grow pale when we find ourselves in an altered situation; and, as he no longer saw Madame Arnoux in the environment wherein he had known her, she seemed to him to have lost some of her fascination; to have degenerated in some way that he could not comprehend—in fact, not to be the same. He was astonished at the serenity of his own heart./... sentimentele slăbesc cînd le schimbi locul...
Gustave Flaubert
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Gustave Flaubert
What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.
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
Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.
Gustave Flaubert
Self-confidence depends on environment: one does not speak in the same tone in the drawing room than in the kitchen.
Gustave Flaubert