Gustave Flaubert Quotes

148 Sourced Quotes

My desire is too universal, too permanent, too intense for me to have desires.

Gustave Flaubert
I call a bourgeois anyone whose thinking is vulgar.

Gustave Flaubert
I don't use women as means to an end: I do what the poet in your novel does — I use them only as objects of contemplation.

Gustave Flaubert
My own passion for nature is becoming uncontrollable. At times I look on animals and even trees with a tenderness that amounts to a feeling of affinity: I derive almost voluptuous sensations from the mere act of seeing — when I see clearly.

Gustave Flaubert
The burden of existence does not weigh on our shoulders when we are composing. It is true that the fatigue and the feeling of desertion that follow are all the more terrible. Let it be so, however.

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

Gustave Flaubert
The writer in his work must be like God in his creation—invisible and all-powerful: he must be everywhere felt, but never seen.

Gustave Flaubert
It is strange, how I was born with little faith in happiness. While still very young I had a complete presentiment of life.

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
By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

Gustave Flaubert
She [Madame Bovary] had that indefinable beauty that comes from happiness, enthusiasm, success— a beauty that is nothing more or less than a harmony of temperament and circumstances.

Gustave Flaubert
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

Gustave Flaubert
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.

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
The brazen arms were working more quickly. They paused no longer. Every time that a child was placed in them the priests of Moloch spread out their hands upon him to burden him with the crimes of the people, vociferating: "They are not men but oxen!" and the multitude round about repeated: "Oxen! oxen!" The devout exclaimed: "Lord! Eat!"

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
Mercury. Kills the patient with the disease.

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

Gustave Flaubert
The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

Gustave Flaubert
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything

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
He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought him.

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

Gustave Flaubert