Top 450 Gustave Flaubert Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “When she was taken too bad she went off quite alone to the sea-shore, so that the customs officer, going his rounds, often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle. Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say.” “But with me,” replied Emma, “it was after marriage that it began.”

— Gustave Flaubert

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

305. “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

306. “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

307. “Poor human weakness! With your words, your languages, your sounds, you speak and stammer – you define God, the heaven and the earth, chemistry and philosophy, and you cannot express, with your language, all the joy that you derive from a naked woman – or a plum pudding.”

— Gustave Flaubert

308. “This man, who was so experienced in love, couldn’t distinguish the dissimilarity in the emotions, behind the similarity of the expressions.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

311. “I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything.”

— Gustave Flaubert

312. “She devoutly put away in her drawers her beautiful dress, down to the satin shoes whose soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor. Her heart was like these. In its friction against wealth something had come over it that could not be effaced.”

— Gustave Flaubert

313. “It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

315. “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

316. “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

317. “Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.”

— Gustave Flaubert

318. “It was all her fortune. It seemed to her very fine thus to throw it away.”

— Gustave Flaubert

319. “The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.”

— Gustave Flaubert

320. “The countryside stretched flat as far as the eye could see; and the tufts of trees clustered around the farmhouses were widely spaced dark purple stains on the vast grey surface that merged at the horizon into the dull tone of the sky.”

— Gustave Flaubert

321. “You’ll always have to deal with bastards, being lied to, deceived, slandered and ridiculed, but that’s to be expected and you must thank heaven when you meet the exception.”

— Gustave Flaubert

322. “Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody’s wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.”

— Gustave Flaubert

323. “I like snow and roses, calm and storm; I like to love, I like to hate. Every contradiction, every absurdity, every folly–I harbor them all.”

— Gustave Flaubert

324. “Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile.”

— Gustave Flaubert

325. “Why, like all men,” she replied. Then added, repulsing him with a languid movement – “You are all evil!”

— Gustave Flaubert

326. “She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die.”

— Gustave Flaubert

327. “Those who were beginning to grow old had an air of youth, while there was something mature in the faces of the young.”

— Gustave Flaubert

328. “Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?”

— Gustave Flaubert

329. “But how nothingness invades us! We are scarcely born ere decay begins for us, in such a way that the whole of life is but one long combat with it, more and more triumphant, on its part, to the consummation, namely, death; and then the reign of decay is exclusive.”

— Gustave Flaubert

330. “Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love wearied her more than great debauchery.”

— Gustave Flaubert

331. “It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them.”

— Gustave Flaubert

332. “What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.”

— Gustave Flaubert

333. “Standing side by side, on some rising ground, they felt, as they drank in the air, the pride of a life more free penetrating into the depths of their souls, with a superabundance of energy, a joy which they could not explain.”

— Gustave Flaubert

334. “On the grave among the pine trees, a boy knelt weeping, his chest, racked by sobs, heaving in the darkness, oppressed by an immense grief gentler than the moon and more unfathomable than the night.”

— Gustave Flaubert

335. “She repeated, “I have a lover! a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her.”

— Gustave Flaubert

336. “Death always brings with it a kind of stupefaction, so difficult is it for the human mind to realize and resign itself to the blank and utter nothingness.”

— Gustave Flaubert

337. “One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ’the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.”

— Gustave Flaubert

338. “Thy chastity is but a more subtle form of corruption, and thy contempt of this world is but the impotence of thy hatred against it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

339. “I do not like to “interest” the public with myself.”

— Gustave Flaubert

340. “When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.”

— Gustave Flaubert

341. “But vilifying those we love always alienates us from them to a certain extent. Idols should not be touched: the gilding comes off on the hands.”

— Gustave Flaubert

342. “Pellerin used to read every available book on aesthetics, in the hope of discovering the true theory of Beauty, for he was convinced that once he had found it he would be able to paint masterpieces.”

— Gustave Flaubert

343. “Do you not know that there are souls constantly tormented?”

— Gustave Flaubert

344. “The head-master made a sign to us to sit down. Then, turning to the class-master, he said to him in a low voice –.”

— Gustave Flaubert

345. “They took each other’s advice, opened one book, went over to another, then did not know what to decide when opinions diverged so widely.”

— Gustave Flaubert

346. “The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don’t begrudge the giving of themselves.”

— Gustave Flaubert

347. “Emma repeated to herself, “Good Heavens! Why did I marry?”

— Gustave Flaubert

348. “And on the endless dusty ribbon of the highway, on sunken roads vaulted over by branches, on paths between stands of grain that rose to his knees, the sun on his shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the night’s bliss, his spirit at peace and his flesh content, he would ride on his way ruminating his happiness, like someone who keeps savoring, hours later, the fragrance of the truffles he has eaten for dinner.”

— Gustave Flaubert

349. “Occasionally there came gusts of winds, breezes from the sea rolling in one sweep over the whole plateau of the Caux country, which brought even to these fields a salt freshness. The rushes, close to the ground, whistled; the branches trembled in a swift rustling, while their summits, ceaselessly swaying, kept up a deep murmur.”

— Gustave Flaubert

350. “She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.”

— Gustave Flaubert