Top 450 Gustave Flaubert Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom.”

— Gustave Flaubert

52. “It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.”

— Gustave Flaubert

53. “Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

54. “What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air – a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.”

— Gustave Flaubert

55. “She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”

— Gustave Flaubert

56. “The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.”

— Gustave Flaubert

57. “The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.”

— Gustave Flaubert

58. “The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”

— Gustave Flaubert

59. “Tout ce qu’on invente est vrai, soi-en sure. La poesie est une chose aussi precise que la geometrie.”

— Gustave Flaubert

60. “Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.”

— Gustave Flaubert

61. “What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.”

— Gustave Flaubert

62. “Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.”

— Gustave Flaubert

63. “Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.”

— Gustave Flaubert

64. “Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.”

— Gustave Flaubert

65. “After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

68. “Human Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

70. “One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.”

— Gustave Flaubert

71. “A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.”

— Gustave Flaubert

72. “One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.”

— Gustave Flaubert

73. “It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.”

— Gustave Flaubert

74. “Sometimes I think I’m liquefying like an old Camembert.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

76. “I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”

— Gustave Flaubert

77. “May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!”

— Gustave Flaubert

78. “Contradiction is what keeps sanity in place.”

— Gustave Flaubert

79. “Madame Bovary is myself.”

— Gustave Flaubert

80. “There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me.”

— Gustave Flaubert

81. “The future is the worst thing about the present.”

— Gustave Flaubert

82. “For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.”

— Gustave Flaubert

83. “Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea – of an ideal.”

— Gustave Flaubert

84. “Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.”

— Gustave Flaubert

85. “The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

88. “Travel, leave everything, copy the birds. The home is one of civilization’s sadnesses.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

90. “L’Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.”

— Gustave Flaubert

91. “I live absolutely like an oyster.”

— Gustave Flaubert

92. “Mi amistad es como los camellos. En cuanto se pone en marcha ya no hay modo de detenerla.”

— Gustave Flaubert

93. “Everything is there: the love of Art.”

— Gustave Flaubert

94. “By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.”

— Gustave Flaubert

95. “Everyone became brave from excess of terror.”

— Gustave Flaubert

96. “The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.”

— Gustave Flaubert

97. “That is but the device of the devil to seduce the faithful more easily. He attacks the strong through the mind, the weak through the flesh.”

— Gustave Flaubert

98. “Cela rend modeste de voyager. On voit quelle petite place on occupe dans le monde.”

— Gustave Flaubert

99. “L’argent ne fait pas le bonheur.”

— Gustave Flaubert

100. “Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!”

— Gustave Flaubert