Gustave Flaubert quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Gustave Flaubert on Wise Famous Quotes.

Her great desire, in fact, was to have something more solid, more tangible than love to rely upon.

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

With my burned hand, I write about the nature of fire.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.

Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands.

Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.

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.

Isn't 'not to be bored' one of the principal goals of life?

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.

Write about daily life as you would write history.

There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.

As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.
(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)

Emma repeated to herself, "Good Heavens! Why did I marry?

To be simple is no small matter.

Travel, leave everything, copy the birds. The home is one of civilization's sadnesses.

I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.

Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.

It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed!

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

His heart was flooded with immense love, and as he gazed on her he could feel his mind growing numb.

For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.

Why, like all men," she replied. Then added, repulsing him with a languid movement - "You are all evil!

In her desire, she confused the sensual pleasures of luxury with the joys of the heart, elegance of manner with delicacy of feeling.

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

Read in oreder to live

Talent is nothing but long patience.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

My novel is the rock to which I cling and I know nothing of what is taking place in the world.

It is a wonderful thing, how no one will allow anyone to live as he likes.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

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

Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.

Charles went to kiss her shoulder.
-Leave me alone! she said, you're creasing my dress.

The new delight of independence soon made his loneliness bearable.

Exuberance is better than taste.

In every parting there comes a moment when the beloved is already no longer with us.

So when will this society, bastardised by every debauchery of mind, body and
soul, finally come to an end?

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

There was always an uncertain promise dangling in the future like a golden fruit hanging from some fantastic bough.

He leaned against the writing desk and stayed there till nightfall, lost in sorrowful thoughts. After all, she had loved him.

One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.

What's improper about it?" retorted the clerk. "Everybody does it in Paris!" It was an irresistible and conclusive argument.

...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art.

It seemed to her that certain parts of the world must produce happiness as they produced peculiar plants which will flourish nowhere else.

Such killings were part of the natural order of things, an inevitable consequence of belonging to a royal household.

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

Self-possession depends on its environment.

Surely it could not have been a dove God had chosen to speak through, since doves could not talk.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

Talent is a long patience.

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

I detest common heroes and moderate feelings, the sort that exist in real life

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

I'm the sort of man who's doomed to be a failure and I'll go to my grave without ever knowing whether I was real gold or just tinsel!

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

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.

It is a delicious thing to write, whether well or badly - to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

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.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

Emma was no asleep, she was pretending to be asleep; and, while he was dozing off at her side, she lay awake, dreaming other dreams.

How oft the warmth of the sun above
Makes a pretty young girl dream of love.

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.

Sadness is a vice.

Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.

Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.

We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!

Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible.

He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.

Emigres: Earned their livelihood by giving guitar lessons and mixing salads.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

The mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the idea?

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only one worth living.

The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague "she" of all the poetry books.

The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft.

It was all her fortune. It seemed to her very fine thus to throw it away.