Gustave Flaubert Quotes

148 Sourced Quotes

To please women you either have to be carefree and play the fool or else be tragic and passionate. When you say to them quite simply that you love them, women laugh at you.

Gustave Flaubert
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Gustave Flaubert
She snatched off her dress and tore at the thin laces of her corsets, which whistled down over her hips like a slithering adder.

Gustave Flaubert
Neither could find anything to say. There comes a moment during leave-taking when the loved one is no longer with us.

Gustave Flaubert
Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times.

Gustave Flaubert
You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

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

Gustave Flaubert
It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

Gustave Flaubert
He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.

Gustave Flaubert
Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.

Gustave Flaubert
Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,—a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.

Gustave Flaubert
One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.

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
Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.

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

Gustave Flaubert
What a horrible invention, the bourgeois, don't you think?

Gustave Flaubert
Axiom: hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom. But I include in the word bourgeois, the bourgeois in blouses as well the bourgeois in coats. It is we and we alone, that is to say the literary men, who are the people, or to say it better: the tradition of humanity.

Gustave Flaubert
I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal 'what's the use?' – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.

Gustave Flaubert
Books are made not like children but like pyramids…and they're just as useless! and they stay in the desert!…Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.

Gustave Flaubert
Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.

Gustave Flaubert
And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?

Gustave Flaubert
But the most wretched thing, is it not-is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.

Gustave Flaubert
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

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

Gustave Flaubert
He is so corrupt that he would willingly pay for the pleasure of selling himself.

Gustave Flaubert