Gustave Flaubert Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Gustave Flaubert on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
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.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
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.)
(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)
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.
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.
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.
So when will this society, bastardised by every debauchery of mind, body and
soul, finally come to an end?
soul, finally come to an end?
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.
What's improper about it?" retorted the clerk. "Everybody does it in Paris!" It was an irresistible and conclusive argument.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.
Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again.
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.