Top 450 Gustave Flaubert Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 6 of 10

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

260. “In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.”

— 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. “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

263. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

265. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

268. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

270. “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

271. “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

272. “Have you ever had the experience of finding in a book some vague idea that’s already occurred to you, some obscure image that comes back to you from the depths of your mind, or a perfect expression of your most subtle feelings?”

— Gustave Flaubert

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

282. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

284. “When you are some-‘one’, why would you wish to be some-‘thing’?”

— 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. “I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.”

— 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. “Then a faintness came over her; she recalled the Viscount who had waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this air an odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes the better to breathe it in. But.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

299. “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

300. “How she listened, the first time, to the sonorous lamentations of romantic melancholia echoing out across heaven and earth! If her childhood had been spent in the dark back-room of a shop in some town, she would now perhaps have been kindled by the lyric surgings of nature which only normally reach us as through the interpretation of a writer.”

— Gustave Flaubert