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Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Gustave Flaubert quote from classy quote

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Books Literature Reading

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Bibliophile Books Literature Reading

Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Books Literature

At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Dreams Fear Goddess Hallucinations Nature Night

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Dreams Everything

Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Dreams Imagination

How badly arranged the world is. What is the purpose of ugliness, suffering, sadness? Why our powerless dreams? Why everything?

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Dreams Powerless Sadness Suffering Ugliness Why World

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Democracy Politics

He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Cowardice French Love Men Women

We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Love Women

The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go to a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Love Women

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

Gustave Flaubert Life Love Strangers Women

He was savoring for the first time the ineffable subtleties of feminine refinement. Never had he encountered this grace of language, this quiet taste in dress, these relaxed, dove like postures. He marveled at the sublimity of her soul and at the lace on her petticoat. With her ever-changing moods, by turns brooding and gay, chattering and silent, fiery and casual, she aroused in him a thousand desires, awakening instincts or memories. She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague she of all the poetry books.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Inspirational Love Women

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

Gustave Flaubert Identity Individuality Mediocrity Soul

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Art Capitalism Humnaity Life Mankind Money Nature Virtue

I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Art Creativity

If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answering that immoderate desire for the infinite and the vague that we call the soul, it is art.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Art

If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Art Artists

The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Art Literature

...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Aim Art

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

Gustave Flaubert Book Reading

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Abstraction Intelligence

From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (1850)

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert History Humanity Life Mankind

The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties, all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Fame History Ruins

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Order Work

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

Gustave Flaubert Forests Harmony Language Listening Nature Waves Words

...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Imagery Nature

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Affair Boredom Marriage

Before marriage she thought hserself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Marriage Sad

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert French Greed Love Money

Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Love Money

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Heart Rain Sadness Winter

As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Heart Life Love

Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Atrocious Shell Stupid Vile World

And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Eternity Moment Passion

Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending 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

Gustave Flaubert Adventure Characters Fiction Imagination Madame Bovary Reading Reading Experience

Everyone rushes wherever his instincts impel him, the populace swarms like insects over a corpse, poets pass by without having the time to sculpt their thoughts, hardly have they scribbled their ideas down on sheets of paper than the sheets are blown away; everything glitters and everything resounds in this masquerade, beneath its ephemeral royalties and its cardboard scepters, gold flows, wine cascades, cold debauchery lifts her skirts and jigs around…horror! horror! and then there hangs over it all a veil that each one grabs part of to hide himself the best he can. Derision! Horror – horror!

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Mankind Society

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Beauty Conventions Duty Gustave Flaubert Life Madame Bovary Rodolphe Society Unconventional

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Artists Creativity

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

Gustave Flaubert Creativity
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