Top 450 Gustave Flaubert Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more.”

— Gustave Flaubert

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

256. “What an elder sees sitting; the young can’t see standing.”

— Gustave Flaubert

257. “I have dreamed much and have done very little.”

— Gustave Flaubert

258. “Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.”

— Gustave Flaubert

259. “A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.”

— Gustave Flaubert

260. “Farming – a vocation accursed of heaven, since one never saw a millionaire involved in it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

261. “Sometimes they opened a book and closed it again; what was the point? On other days they had the idea of tidying up the garden, but after a quarter of an hour they felt tired; or of looking at their farm, but they came back sick at heart; or doing household jobs, but Germaine cried out in protest; they gave up.”

— Gustave Flaubert

262. “The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.”

— Gustave Flaubert

263. “Coming delights, like tropical beaches, send out their native enchantment over the vast spaces that precede them – a perfumed breeze that lulls and drugs you out of all anxiety as to what may yet await you below the horizon.”

— Gustave Flaubert

264. “On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.”

— Gustave Flaubert

265. “The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

266. “The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame.”

— Gustave Flaubert

267. “Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.”

— Gustave Flaubert

268. “What is glory? It is to have a lot of nonsense talked about you.”

— Gustave Flaubert

269. “The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.”

— Gustave Flaubert

270. “If you knew all the dreams I’ve dreamed!”

— Gustave Flaubert

271. “I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.”

— Gustave Flaubert

272. “If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

274. “I understand,” said the notary; “a man of science can’t be worried with the practical details of life.”

— Gustave Flaubert

275. “I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.”

— Gustave Flaubert

276. “I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.”

— Gustave Flaubert

277. “Love, she believed, must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightening – a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart with it off into the abyss.”

— Gustave Flaubert

278. “I can’t admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.”

— Gustave Flaubert

279. “He had that incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for social conventions, that seduces or exasperates them.”

— Gustave Flaubert

280. “Snicker on hearing his name: ‘the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.’”

— Gustave Flaubert

281. “I call on your pride. Remember what you’ve done, what you dream of doing, and rise up. Great Heavens, consider yourself with more respect!”

— Gustave Flaubert

282. “This sense of my own weakness and emptiness comforts me. I feel myself a mere speck of dust lost in space, yet I am part of that endless grandeur which envelopes me. I could never see why that should be cause for despair, since there could very well be nothing at all behind the black curtain.”

— Gustave Flaubert

283. “It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.”

— Gustave Flaubert

284. “On the hill there was a poor old tramp wandering about with his stick, in among the carriages. A mass of rags covered his shoulders, and a squashed beaver-hat, bent down into the shape of a bowl, concealed his face; but, when he took it off, he exposed, instead of eyelids, two yawning bloodstained holes. The flesh was tattered into scarlet strips; and fluid was trickling out, congealing into green crusts that reached down to his nose, with black nostrils that kept sniffing convulsively.”

— Gustave Flaubert

285. “Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.”

— Gustave Flaubert

286. “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

287. “She no longer existed.”

— Gustave Flaubert

288. “For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.”

— Gustave Flaubert

289. “What he then saw was like an apparition. She was seated in the middle of a bench all alone, or, at any rate, he could see no one, dazzled as he was by her eyes.”

— Gustave Flaubert

290. “I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker’s head if they’re not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it’s bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God’s face when it’s bitter.”

— Gustave Flaubert

291. “Once one has kissed a cadaver’s forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase.”

— Gustave Flaubert

292. “Accustomed to the calm aspects of things, she turned, instead, toward the more tumultuous. She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. She needed to derive from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immediate gratification of her heart, – being by temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions and not landscapes.”

— Gustave Flaubert

293. “The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.”

— Gustave Flaubert

294. “There is always after the death of anyone a kind of stupefaction; so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign ourselves to believe in it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

295. “He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them. Emma was like any other of his mistresses, and the charm of novelty slipping off gradually like a peace of clothing revealed in his nakedness the eternal monotony of passion which always assumes the same form and uses the same languages. He could not perceive, this man of such broad experiences, the difference in feelings that might underlay similarities of expression.”

— Gustave Flaubert

296. “How badly arranged the world is. What is the purpose of ugliness, suffering, sadness? Why our powerless dreams? Why everything?”

— Gustave Flaubert

297. “What happiness there had been at that time, what freedom, what hope! What an abundance of illusions! Nothing was left of them now. She had got rid of them all in her soul’s life, in all her successive conditions of life, maidenhood, her marriage, and her love – thus constantly losing them all her life through, like a traveller who leaves something of his wealth at every inn along his road.”

— Gustave Flaubert

298. “His heart was flooded with immense love, and as he gazed on her he could feel his mind growing numb.”

— Gustave Flaubert

299. “Some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her.”

— Gustave Flaubert

300. “You must write for yourself, above all.”

— Gustave Flaubert