Gustave Flaubert Quotes

148 Sourced Quotes

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
Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn't come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words bliss, passion, and rapture - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

Gustave Flaubert
Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom

Gustave Flaubert
What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

Gustave Flaubert
I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world

Gustave Flaubert
Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

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
As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.

Gustave Flaubert
What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?

Gustave Flaubert
The eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and always speaks the same language.

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

Gustave Flaubert
Without ideality, there is no grandeur; without grandeur there is no beauty. Olympus is a mountain. The most effective monument will always be the Pyramids. Exuberance is better than taste; the desert is better than a streetpavement, and a savage is surely better than a hairdresser!

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

Gustave Flaubert
It never occurred to her that if the drainpipes of a house are clogged, the rain may collect in pools on the roof; and she suspected no danger until suddenly she discovered a crack in the wall.

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
By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

Gustave Flaubert