Gustave Flaubert Quotes

148 Sourced Quotes

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

Gustave Flaubert
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert
She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague she of all the poetry books.

Gustave Flaubert
It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

Gustave Flaubert
LITTRÉ. Snicker on hearing his name: 'the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.'

Gustave Flaubert
She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.

Gustave Flaubert
Accustomed to calm aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary, to those of excitement. She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins.

Gustave Flaubert
The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in Art and count all the rest as nothing. One's pride, if it is well founded, makes up for everything else.

Gustave Flaubert
I was so depressed for the next three days that more than once I thought I would die. I mean that literally. No matter how great an effort I made, I could not utter a word. I begin to disbelieve that people die of grief, because I am alive.

Gustave Flaubert
Dissection. An outrage upon the majesty of death.

Gustave Flaubert
Mercury. Kills the patient with the disease.

Gustave Flaubert
Sea-sickness. To avoid, all you have to do is think of something else.

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
Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.

Gustave Flaubert
My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing words, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called science.

Gustave Flaubert
One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

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

Gustave Flaubert
The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves.

Gustave Flaubert
SMARH: How vast creation is! I see the planets rise, I see the fiery stars driven along... Space opens out as I rise, worlds revolve around me, and I am the center of this bustling creation.

Gustave Flaubert
Crayfish. Female of the lobster. Walks backward. Always call reactionaries "crayfish."

Gustave Flaubert
I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.

Gustave Flaubert
Casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands.

Gustave Flaubert
Alabaster. Its use is to describe the most beautiful parts of a woman's body.

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

Gustave Flaubert
I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.

Gustave Flaubert
Cholera: You catch it from eating melons. The cure is lots of tea with rum in it.

Gustave Flaubert
Cerumen. Human wax. Should not be removed: it keeps insects from entering the ears.

Gustave Flaubert
What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.

Gustave Flaubert
The soul expands with suffering, thus enormously increasing its capacity; what formerly filled it to the point of bursting now barely covers the bottom.

Gustave Flaubert
The infinite stupidity of the masses makes me indulgent to individualities, however odious they may be.

Gustave Flaubert