Gustave Flaubert Quotes

148 Sourced Quotes

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

Gustave Flaubert
You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

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

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

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

Gustave Flaubert
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Gustave Flaubert
In her enthusiasms she had always looked for something tangible: she had always loved church for its flowers, music for its romantic words, literature for its power to stir the passions and she rebelled before the mysteries of faith just as she grew ever more restive under discipline, which was antipathetic to her nature.

Gustave Flaubert
Remembering the ball became for Emma a daily occupation. Every time Wednesday came round, she told herself when she woke up: 'Ah! One week ago...two weeks ago...three weeks ago, I was there!' And, little by little, in her memory, the faces all blurred together; she forgot the tunes of the quadrilles; no longer could she so clearly picture the liveries and the rooms; some details disappeared, but the yearning remained.

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

Gustave Flaubert