Gustave Flaubert - Love Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

View all Gustave Flaubert Quotes
He saw no reason why there should be all this to-do about so simple a thing as love-making.

Gustave Flaubert
Our duty is to feel what is great and love what is beautiful — not to accept all the social conventions and the infamies they impose on us.

Gustave Flaubert
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
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
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
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

Gustave Flaubert
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.

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

Gustave Flaubert
He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.

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
Casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands.

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
One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being.

Gustave Flaubert