Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (1856)

39 Sourced Quotes

View all Gustave Flaubert Quotes
Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

Gustave Flaubert
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
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

Gustave Flaubert
No one can ever state the exact measure of his needs, nor his ideas nor his sorrows.

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
Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.

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
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
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