Top 450 Gustave Flaubert Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.”

— Gustave Flaubert

202. “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

203. “Madame Aubain’s servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l’Eveque for half a century.”

— Gustave Flaubert

204. “As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.”

— Gustave Flaubert

205. “But she – her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.”

— Gustave Flaubert

206. “The citadel of Machaerus rose east of the Dead Sea on a basalt Peak shaped like a cone, girdled by four deep valleys; two about its sides, one in front, and the fourth behind.”

— Gustave Flaubert

207. “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

208. “God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

210. “Are you not tired as I am of waking up every morning and seeing the sun all over again? Tired of living the same life, suffering the same sorrow? Tired of desiring, and tired of being sated? Tired of waiting, and tired of possessing?”

— Gustave Flaubert

211. “With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady’s album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.”

— Gustave Flaubert

212. “I am the obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face.”

— Gustave Flaubert

213. “But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled – inevitably – it’s the way with everything human.”

— Gustave Flaubert

214. “You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.”

— Gustave Flaubert

215. “One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.”

— Gustave Flaubert

216. “To see one’s name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.”

— Gustave Flaubert

217. “Talent is long patience.”

— Gustave Flaubert

218. “I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind.”

— Gustave Flaubert

219. “Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It’s a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expected to find it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

220. “She only wished to lean on something more solid than love.”

— Gustave Flaubert

221. “And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.”

— Gustave Flaubert

222. “The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.”

— Gustave Flaubert

223. “One mustn’t always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.”

— Gustave Flaubert

224. “A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”

— Gustave Flaubert

225. “Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.”

— Gustave Flaubert

226. “This splendid vision dwelt in her memory as the most beautiful thing that it was possible to dream, so that now she strove to recall her sensation. That still lasted, however, but in a less exclusive fashion and with a deeper sweetness. Her soul, tortured by.”

— Gustave Flaubert

227. “To be simple is no small matter.”

— Gustave Flaubert

228. “Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.”

— Gustave Flaubert

229. “So he gave up his flute, exalted sentiments, and poetry; for every bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet.”

— Gustave Flaubert

230. “Self-possession depends on its environment.”

— Gustave Flaubert

231. “I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all.”

— Gustave Flaubert

232. “I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world.”

— Gustave Flaubert

233. “Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.”

— Gustave Flaubert

234. “Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.”

— Gustave Flaubert

235. “For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.”

— Gustave Flaubert

236. “He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.”

— Gustave Flaubert

237. “I feel torn to pieces by a rage of love.”

— Gustave Flaubert

238. “Speech is a rolling machine that always stretches the feelings it expresses.”

— Gustave Flaubert

239. “The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet.”

— Gustave Flaubert

240. “I have patience in all things – as far as the antechamber.”

— Gustave Flaubert

241. “There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more.”

— Gustave Flaubert

242. “It is so sweet, amid all the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness.”

— Gustave Flaubert

243. “The public wants work which flatters its illusions.”

— Gustave Flaubert

244. “Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.”

— Gustave Flaubert

245. “It was not the first time that they had seen trees, a blue sky, meadows; that they had heard the water flowing and the wind blowing in the leaves; but, no doubt, they had never admired all this, as if Nature had not existed before, or had only begun to be beautiful since the gratification of their desires.”

— Gustave Flaubert

246. “Thought is the greatest of pleasures – pleasure itself is only imagination – have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?”

— Gustave Flaubert

247. “I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!”

— Gustave Flaubert

248. “There’s a fundamental stupidity in mankind which is as eternal as life itself.”

— Gustave Flaubert

249. “Remembering the ball became for Emma a daily occupation. Every time Wednesday came round, she told herself when she woke up: ‘Ah! One week ago... two weeks ago... three weeks ago, I was there!’ And, little by little, in her memory, the faces all blurred together; she forgot the tunes of the quadrilles; no longer could she so clearly picture the liveries and the rooms; some details disappeared, but the yearning remained.”

— Gustave Flaubert

250. “Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level.”

— Gustave Flaubert