Top 450 Gustave Flaubert Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “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

152. “Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitterness.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

154. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

156. “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

157. “She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins.”

— Gustave Flaubert

158. “Haven’t you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you’ve had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?”

— Gustave Flaubert

159. “And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.”

— Gustave Flaubert

160. “The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.”

— Gustave Flaubert

161. “How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.”

— Gustave Flaubert

162. “Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

164. “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.”

— Gustave Flaubert

165. “The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding – places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust – or emptiness!”

— Gustave Flaubert

166. “Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.”

— Gustave Flaubert

167. “Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.”

— Gustave Flaubert

168. “The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I’m wandering in countries I can see every detail of – I’m playing a role in the story I’m reading. I actually feel I’m the characters – I live and breathe them.”

— Gustave Flaubert

169. “I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.”

— Gustave Flaubert

170. “Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.”

— Gustave Flaubert

171. “Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They’re a refuge from life’s disillusionments.”

— Gustave Flaubert

172. “A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.”

— Gustave Flaubert

173. “Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”

— Gustave Flaubert

174. “Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.”

— Gustave Flaubert

175. “You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.”

— Gustave Flaubert

176. “Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?”

— Gustave Flaubert

177. “I was resting in the shadow of that ideal happiness as in the shade of the poisonous manchineel tree, without foreseeing the consequences.”

— Gustave Flaubert

178. “The style, which is something I take to heart, is getting on my nerves horribly. It frustrates and torments me. I have days when Iam sick about it and nights when it gives me a fever. The more I go at it the more I find myself incapable of conveying the Idea.”

— Gustave Flaubert

179. “What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.”

— Gustave Flaubert

180. “My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.”

— Gustave Flaubert

181. “My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing words, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called science.”

— Gustave Flaubert

182. “And indeed, what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?”

— Gustave Flaubert

183. “What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!”

— Gustave Flaubert

184. “There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.”

— Gustave Flaubert

185. “Doesn’t it seem to you,” asked Madame Bovary, “that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?”

— Gustave Flaubert

186. “No se piensa en nada; las horas pasan. Uno se pasea inmovil por paises que cree ver, y su pensamiento, enlazandose a la ficcion, se recrea en los detalles o sigue el hilo de las aventuras. Se identifica con los personajes; parece que somos nosotros mismos los que participamos bajo sus pieles.”

— Gustave Flaubert

187. “Exuberance is better than taste.”

— Gustave Flaubert

188. “When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women.”

— Gustave Flaubert

189. “Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

191. “On spinach: I dislike it, and am happy to dislike it because if I liked it I would eat it, and I cannot stand it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

192. “Cheer up,′ said the captain’s son. ‘Life is long, and we are young.”

— Gustave Flaubert

193. “Beautiful things spoil nothing.”

— Gustave Flaubert

194. “Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one’s emotions.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

196. “Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.”

— Gustave Flaubert

197. “There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.”

— Gustave Flaubert

198. “What happiness there had been in those days! What freedom! What hope! What an abundance of illusions! She had none left now. Each new venture had cost her some of them, each of her successive conditions: as virgin, wife and mistress; she had lost them all along the course of her life, like a traveler who leaves some of his wealth at every inn along the road.”

— Gustave Flaubert

199. “But the most wretched thing, is it not-is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.”

— Gustave Flaubert

200. “My soul has been haunted by something like those forgotten melodies that come back to us at twilight, during those slow hours in which memory, like a ghost among ruins, stalks our thoughts.”

— Gustave Flaubert