Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert -
Madame Bovary (1856)
39 Sourced Quotes
View all Gustave Flaubert Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
He saw no reason why there should be all this to-do about so simple a thing as love-making.
Gustave Flaubert
Source
Report...
She remembered the heroines of novels she had read, and the lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her.
Gustave Flaubert
Source
Report...
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.
Gustave Flaubert
Source
Report...
Iced champagne was served, and the feel of the cold wine in her mouth gave Emma a shiver that ran over her from head to toe.
Gustave Flaubert
Source
Report...
There isn't a bourgeois alive who in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or for a minute, hasn't thought himself capable of boundless passions and noble exploits. The sorriest little woman-chaser has dreamed of Oriental queens; in a corner of every notary's heart lie the moldy remains of a poet.
Gustave Flaubert
Source
Report...
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.
Gustave Flaubert
Source
Report...
But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled — inevitably — it's the way with everything human.
Gustave Flaubert
Source
Report...
Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
Gustave Flaubert
Source
Report...
One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
Gustave Flaubert
Source
Report...
We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off in our hands.
Gustave Flaubert
Source
Report...
Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!
Gustave Flaubert
Source
Report...
She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague she of all the poetry books.
Gustave Flaubert
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.
Gustave Flaubert
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
1
2
Quote of the day
In the decline of the day, near Kentucky river, as we ascended the brow of a small hill, a number of Indians rushed out of a thick cane-brake upon us, and made us prisoners.
Daniel Boone
Gustave Flaubert
Creative Commons
Born:
December 12, 1821
Died:
May 8, 1880
(aged 58)
More about Gustave Flaubert...
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes