Gustave Flaubert Quotes

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

Irony takes nothing away from pathos.

~ 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

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

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything

~ 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

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

Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.

~ Gustave Flaubert

And he beholds the moon, like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.

~ 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

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

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

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fin

~ Gustave Flaubert

Speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.

~ 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

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

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

Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?

~ 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

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

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

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

~ 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

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

~ Gustave Flaubert

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

~ Gustave Flaubert

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

~ Gustave Flaubert

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

~ Gustave Flaubert

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

~ Gustave Flaubert

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

~ Gustave Flaubert

There is no truth. There is only perception.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Read in order to live.

~ Gustave Flaubert