Top 450 Gustave Flaubert Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.”

— Gustave Flaubert

102. “Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.”

— Gustave Flaubert

103. “It is true that I am endowed with an absurd sensitiveness, what scratches others tears me to pieces.”

— Gustave Flaubert

104. “Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.”

— Gustave Flaubert

105. “She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.”

— Gustave Flaubert

106. “It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.”

— Gustave Flaubert

107. “The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.”

— Gustave Flaubert

108. “What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.”

— Gustave Flaubert

109. “An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.”

— Gustave Flaubert

110. “A memory is a beautiful thing, it’s almost a desire that you miss.”

— Gustave Flaubert

111. “Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.”

— Gustave Flaubert

112. “One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.”

— Gustave Flaubert

113. “I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.”

— Gustave Flaubert

114. “I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.”

— Gustave Flaubert

115. “After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

116. “The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”

— Gustave Flaubert

117. “It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.”

— Gustave Flaubert

118. “The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.”

— Gustave Flaubert

119. “Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.”

— Gustave Flaubert

120. “My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my own doubt.”

— Gustave Flaubert

121. “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

122. “The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror.”

— Gustave Flaubert

123. “Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.”

— Gustave Flaubert

124. “One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.”

— Gustave Flaubert

125. “By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream.”

— Gustave Flaubert

126. “It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.”

— Gustave Flaubert

127. “I love the autumn – that melancholy season that suits memories so well. When the trees have lost their leaves, when the sky at sunset still preserves the russet hue that fills with gold the withered grass, it is sweet to watch the final fading of the fires that until recently burnt within you.”

— Gustave Flaubert

128. “But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.”

— Gustave Flaubert

129. “Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening – a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.”

— Gustave Flaubert

130. “A man so habituated to corruption that he would happily pay for the pleasure of selling himself.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

132. “Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.”

— Gustave Flaubert

133. “A man, at least, is free; he can explore each passion and every kingdom, conquer obstacles, feast upon the most exotic pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Both inert and yielding, against her are ranged the weakness of the flesh and the inequity of the law. Her will, like the veil strung to her bonnet, flutters in every breeze; always there is the desire urging, always the convention restraining.”

— Gustave Flaubert

134. “We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.”

— Gustave Flaubert

135. “Art is nothing without form.”

— Gustave Flaubert

136. “Coffee: Induces wit. Good only if it comes through Havre. After a big dinner party it is taken standing up. Take it without sugar – very swank: gives the impression you have lived in the East.”

— Gustave Flaubert

137. “What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.”

— Gustave Flaubert

138. “But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire. She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated.”

— Gustave Flaubert

139. “What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

142. “Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.”

— Gustave Flaubert

143. “How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.”

— Gustave Flaubert

144. “One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being.”

— Gustave Flaubert

145. “What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.”

— Gustave Flaubert

146. “He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides.”

— Gustave Flaubert

147. “You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.”

— Gustave Flaubert

148. “Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.”

— Gustave Flaubert

149. “The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.”

— Gustave Flaubert

150. “The morality of art is in its very beauty.”

— Gustave Flaubert