Top 450 Gustave Flaubert Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else’s – monotonous, sensible, stupid.”

— Gustave Flaubert

204. “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

205. “As to Emma, she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings – a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that on the terrace of houses it makes lakes when the pipes are choked, and she would thus have remained in her security when she suddenly discovered a rent in the wall of it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

208. “Talent is long patience.”

— Gustave Flaubert

209. “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

210. “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

211. “Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

212. “One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!”

— Gustave Flaubert

213. “I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.”

— Gustave Flaubert

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

224. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

229. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

234. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

236. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— 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. “Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

244. “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

245. “As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

247. “I’m the sort of man who’s doomed to be a failure and I’ll go to my grave without ever knowing whether I was real gold or just tinsel!”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

249. “All that has to do with life is repugnant to me; everything that draws me to it horrifies me. I should like never to have been born, or to die. I have within me, deep within me, a distaste which keeps me from enjoying anything and which fills my soul to the point of suffocating it. It reappears in relation to everything, like the bloated bodies of dogs which come back to the surface of the water despite the stones that have been tied to their necks to drown them.”

— Gustave Flaubert

250. “Leon at once envied the calm of the tomb, and one evening he had even made his will, asking to be buried in that beautiful rug with velvet stripes he had received from her. For this was how they would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now adapting their past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.”

— Gustave Flaubert