Gustave Flaubert Quotes

148 Sourced Quotes

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

Gustave Flaubert
I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.

Gustave Flaubert
I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports.... When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.

Gustave Flaubert
Don't talk to me about your hideous reality! What does it mean — reality? Some see things black, others blue — the multitude sees them brute-fashion. There is nothing less natural than Michael Angelo; there is nothing more powerful! The anxiety about eternal truth is a mark of contemporary baseness; and art will become, if things go on in that way, a sort of poor joke as much below religion as it is below poetry, and as much below politics as it is below business. You will never reach its end — yes, its end! — which is to cause within us an impersonal exaltation, with petty works, in spite of all your finished execution.

Gustave Flaubert
I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!

Gustave Flaubert
My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing words, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called science.

Gustave Flaubert
Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly: ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling, than to conjure away the burden and bitterness.

Gustave Flaubert
Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.

Gustave Flaubert
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

Gustave Flaubert
From time to time, in the towns, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be going at a dizzy rate. We are dancing not on a volcano, but on the rotten seat of a latrine.

Gustave Flaubert
Discharge. Rejoice when it leaves any affected part, and express astonishment that the human body can contain so much matter.

Gustave Flaubert
Accustomed to calm aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary, to those of excitement. She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins.

Gustave Flaubert
The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in Art and count all the rest as nothing. One's pride, if it is well founded, makes up for everything else.

Gustave Flaubert
I was so depressed for the next three days that more than once I thought I would die. I mean that literally. No matter how great an effort I made, I could not utter a word. I begin to disbelieve that people die of grief, because I am alive.

Gustave Flaubert
I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.

Gustave Flaubert
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