Top 450 Gustave Flaubert Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “She no longer existed.”

— Gustave Flaubert

307. “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

308. “Art, like the Jewish God, wallows in sacrifices. So tear yourself to pieces, mortify your flesh, roll in ashes, smear yourself with filth and spittle, wrench out your heart! You will be alone, your feet will bleed, an infernal disgust will be with you throughout your pilgrimage, what gives joy to others will give none to you, what to them are but pinpricks will cut you to the quick, and you will be lost in the hurricane with only beauty’s faint glow visible on the horizon.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

310. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

315. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

323. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

325. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

327. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “She hoped for a son; he would be strong and dark; she would call him George; and this idea of having a male child was like an expected revenge for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free; he may travel over passions and over countries, overcome obstacles, taste of the most far-away pleasures. But a woman is always hampered.”

— Gustave Flaubert

334. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

337. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

340. “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

341. “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

342. “De liefde, meende zij, moest plotseling komen, met donder en bliksem -als een orkaan uit de hemel, die het leven overvalt, het omverwerpt, ieders wil als blaadjes van de bomen rukt en het hart volledig in de afgrond stort. Zij wist niet dat de regen plassen vormt op het plat van de huizen als de goten zijn verstopt; en zij zou zich dan ook nergens zorgen om hebben gemaakt, als zij niet plotseling een scheur in de muur had ontdekt.”

— Gustave Flaubert

343. “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

344. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

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

— Gustave Flaubert