Top 450 Gustave Flaubert Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.”

— Gustave Flaubert

102. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

104. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

106. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

112. “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

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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

131. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

135. “Art is nothing without form.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

147. “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

148. “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

149. “Of all lies, art is the least untrue.”

— Gustave Flaubert

150. “There is a part of everything that remains unexplored, for we have fallen into the habit of remembering, whenever we use our eyes, what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the slightest thing contains a little that is unknown. We must find it. To describe a blazing fire or a tree in a plain, we must remain before that fire or that tree until they no longer resemble for us any other tree or any other fire.”

— Gustave Flaubert