Gustave Flaubert Quotes

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

A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands. ~ 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

[Hers] was an existence between heaven and earth ... beyond her
stretched as far as the eye could see ... an immense space of joys and
passions ... [But] did not love, like flowers, need a special soil, a
particular temperature? Sighs by moonlight, long embraces, tears cried into yielding hands ... the fevers of the flesh and the langours of tenderness ... ~ 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

Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex ... ~ Gustave Flaubert

On a Parisienne's Bookshelf
THERE ARE MANY BOOKS ON A PARISIENNE'S BOOKSHELF:

The books you so often claim you've read that you actually believe you have.
The books you read in school from which you remember only the main character's name.
The art books your parents give you each Christmas so you can get some "culture".
The art books that you bought yourself and which you really love.
The books that you've been promising yourself you'll read next summer … for the past ten years.
The books you bought only because you liked the title.
The books that you think makes you cool.
The books you read over and over again, and that evolve along with your life.
The books that remind you of someone you loved.
The books you keep for your children, just in case you ever have any.
The books whose first ten pages you've read so many times you know them by heart.
The books you own simply because you must and, taken together, form intangible proof that you are well read.
AND THEN THERE ARE THE BOOKS YOU HAVE READ, LOVED, AND WHICH ARE A PART OF YOUR IDENTITY:

The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
Belle du Seigneur, Albert Cohen
Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
L'Écume des jours, Boris Vian
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand C ~ Caroline De Maigret

After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again. ~ Gustave Flaubert

If we knew how our body is made, we wouldn't dare move. ~ 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

Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature. ~ Gustave Flaubert

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

Speech is a rolling machine that always stretches the feelings it expresses. ~ Gustave Flaubert

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

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution. ~ Gustave Flaubert

One day, you find it,' repeated Rodolphe, 'one day, quite suddenly, when you've given up hope. Then new horizons stretch before you, and it's like a voice that cries: "Here it is!" You long to tell this person everything that's ever happened to you, to give everything, to sacrifice everything to this person! There's no need for words - you can read each other's thoughts. You've seen each other in your dreams.' (He was staring at her.) 'So, at last, it's here, this treasure you've been so desperately seeking, here, before you, bright and sparkling. But you still feel unsure, you daren't believe in it; you're dazzled, as if you'd come from out of the shadows into the light. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Charles' conversation was as flat as a street pavement, on which everybody's ideas trudged past, in their workaday dress, provoking no emotion, no laughter, no dreams. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Read in oreder to live ~ 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

All that has to do with life is repugnant to me; everything that draws me to it horrifies me. I should like never to have been born, or to die. I have within me, deep within me, a distaste which keeps me from enjoying anything and which fills my soul to the point of suffocating it. It reappears in relation to everything, like the bloated bodies of dogs which come back to the surface of the water despite the stones that have been tied to their necks to drown them. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Reveal art; conceal the artist. ~ Gustave Flaubert

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

The hearts of women are like little pieces of furniture wherein things are secreted, full of drawers fitted into each other; one hurts himself, breaks his nails in opening them, and then finds within only some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness! And then perhaps he felt afraid of learning too much about the matter. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write. ~ Gustave Flaubert

When you are some-'one', why would you wish to be some-'thing'? ~ Gustave Flaubert

Sorrow rushed into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in abandoned manor houses. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Talent is a long patience. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Future joys are like tropical shores; like a fragrant breeze, they extend their innate softness to the immense inland world of past experience, and we are lulled by this intoxication into forgetting the unseen horizons beyond. ~ 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

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 more flowery a person's speech ... the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed. ~ Gustave Flaubert

The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. ~ Gustave Flaubert

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

You don't make art out of good intentions. ~ Gustave Flaubert

If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed! ~ 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

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room ~ Gustave Flaubert

The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft. ~ Gustave Flaubert

For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all ~ Gustave Flaubert

Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it. ~ Gustave Flaubert

It is a delightful thing to write, to cease to be oneself, to flow through the whole creation of which one speaks. Today, for example, man and woman at the same time, lover and mistress at once, I rode horseback through a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words they said to each other and the red sun that beat down on their eyelids, heavy with love, and made them droop. Is this pride or piety? Is it the inane outpouring of egotism, or a vague and noble religious instinct? When I think it over, after experiencing these delights, I would be tempted to offer a prayer of gratitude to God, if I were sure he could hear me. ~ Gustave Flaubert

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Exuberance is better than taste. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times ... The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Talent is long patience. ~ Gustave Flaubert

It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don't get horny enough to actually to father them. ~ Gustave Flaubert

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use. ~ Gustave Flaubert

What was it that thus set so far asunder the morning of the day before yesterday and the evening of to-day? ~ Gustave Flaubert

This is indeed a funny country. Yesterday, for example, we were in a cafe which is one of the best in Cairo, and there were, at the same time as ourselves, inside, a donkey shitting, and a gentleman who was pissing in a corner. No one finds that odd; no one says anything. ~ Gustave Flaubert

And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light. ~ Gustave Flaubert

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

As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker. ~ Gustave Flaubert

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

One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes. ~ Gustave Flaubert

He leaned against the writing desk and stayed there till nightfall, lost in sorrowful thoughts. After all, she had loved him. ~ Gustave Flaubert

In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on. ~ 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

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

What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air
a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible. ~ Gustave Flaubert

The head-master made a ~ Gustave Flaubert

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don't need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the eternal vault like the ancients. My God! mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I am for the profession of faith of the 'Savoyard Vicar,' and the immortal principles of '89! And 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 proves 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

Write about daily life as you would write history. ~ Gustave Flaubert

DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.) ~ Gustave Flaubert

Leon was weary of loving without any result; moreover he was beginning to feel that depression caused by the repetition of the same kind of life, when no interest inspires and no hope sustains it. He was so bored with Yonville and its inhabitants, that the sight of certain persons, of certain houses, irritated him beyond endurance; and the chemist, good fellow though he was, was becoming absolutely unbearable to him. Yet the prospect of a new condition of life frightened as much as it seduced him. ~ Gustave Flaubert

You can't find the soul with a scalpel. ~ Gustave Flaubert

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness. ~ Gustave Flaubert

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

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

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

Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn't that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire? ~ 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

The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family. ~ 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

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

She remembered the heroines of novels she had read, and the lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. Now she saw herself as one of those amoureuses whom she had so envied: she was becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures; the long dream of her youth was coming true. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Two men appeared.
One came from the Bastille, the other from the Jardin des Plantes. The taller of the two, in a linen costume, walked with his hat pushed back, waistcoat undone and cravat in hand. The smaller one, whose body was enveloped in a brown frock-coat, had a peaked cap on his bent head.
When they came to the middle of the boulevard they both sat down at the same moment on the same seat.
Each took off his hat to mop his brow and put it beside him; and the smaller man noticed, written inside his neighbour's hat, Bouvard; while the latter easily made out the word Pécuchet, in the cap belonging to the individual in the frock-coat. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her. ~ Gustave Flaubert

She no longer existed. ~ Gustave Flaubert

It is a wonderful thing, how no one will allow anyone to live as he likes. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously? ~ Gustave Flaubert

For her, life was as cold as an attic with a window looking to the north, and ennui, like a spider, was silently spinning its shadowy web in every cranny of her heart. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles. ~ Gustave Flaubert

There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni. ~ Gustave Flaubert

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

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts. ~ Gustave Flaubert

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

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

I wouldn't mind a bit seeing all civilization crumble like a mason's scaffolding before the building was finished
~ Gustave Flaubert