Gustave Flaubert Quotes

148 Sourced Quotes

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

Gustave Flaubert
There isn't a bourgeois alive who in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or for a minute, hasn't thought himself capable of boundless passions and noble exploits. The sorriest little woman-chaser has dreamed of Oriental queens; in a corner of every notary's heart lie the moldy remains of a poet.

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

Gustave Flaubert
May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!

Gustave Flaubert
I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter

Gustave Flaubert
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.

Gustave Flaubert
But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled — inevitably — it's the way with everything human.

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

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

Gustave Flaubert
Come, let's be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

Gustave Flaubert
Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.

Gustave Flaubert
Prose was born yesterday—this is what we must tell ourselves. Poetry is pre-eminently the medium of past literatures. All the metrical combinations have been tried but nothing like this can be said of prose.

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
We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off in our hands.

Gustave Flaubert
Naturalness and ease of manner—a product of sophistication which the gullible interpret as a sign of instant affinity.

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
Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times.

Gustave Flaubert
Dentists. All untruthful. They use steel balm: are said to be also chiropodists. Pretend to be surgeons, just as opticians pretend to be physicists.

Gustave Flaubert
I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.

Gustave Flaubert
The author in his work should be like God in the universe: everywhere present and nowhere visible.

Gustave Flaubert