Gustave Flaubert Quotes

148 Sourced Quotes

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
Asp: Animal known through Cleopatra's basket of figs.

Gustave Flaubert
Isn't 'not to be bored' one of the principal goals of life?

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

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

Gustave Flaubert
To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.

Gustave Flaubert
Anyone's death always releases something like an aura of stupefaction, so difficult is it to grasp this irruption of nothingness and to believe that it has actually taken place.

Gustave Flaubert
There was an air of indifference about them [the male guests], a calm produced by the gratification of every passion. that special brutality which comes from the habit of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit and tickle one's vanity—the handling of blooded horses, the pursuit of loose women.

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

Gustave Flaubert