Top 450 Gustave Flaubert Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “And he was beginning to feel that discouragement which is engendered by a life of repetition, when no interest guides nor expectation sustains it.”

— Gustave Flaubert

352. “What was it that thus set so far asunder the morning of the day before yesterday and the evening of to-day?”

— Gustave Flaubert

353. “We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself!”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

355. “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

356. “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

357. “She now felt an incessant and universal numbness.”

— Gustave Flaubert

358. “Their separation was becoming intolerable. “I would rather die!” said Emma. She was writhing in his arms, weeping. “Adieu! adieu! When shall I see you again?”

— Gustave Flaubert

359. “The more ideas they had the more they suffered.”

— Gustave Flaubert

360. “But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men.”

— Gustave Flaubert

361. “But that which most attracts the eye is opposite the Lion d’Or inn, the chemist’s shop of Monsieur Homais. In the evening especially its argand lamp is lit up and the red and green jars that embellish his shop-front throw far across the street their two streams of colour; then across them as if in Bengal lights is seen the shadow of the chemist leaning over his desk.”

— Gustave Flaubert

362. “Sometimes, too, she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in a novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the “upper ten” that she had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was something, an ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation. She confided many a thing to her greyhound. She would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the pendulum of the clock.”

— Gustave Flaubert

363. “I laugh at everything, even at that which I love the most. There is no fact, thing, feeling or person over which I have not blithely run my clownishness, like an iron roller imparting sheen to cloth.”

— Gustave Flaubert

364. “Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.”

— Gustave Flaubert

365. “What’s improper about it?” retorted the clerk. “Everybody does it in Paris!” It was an irresistible and conclusive argument.”

— Gustave Flaubert

366. “Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again.”

— Gustave Flaubert

367. “Het was een van die zuivere gevoelens die het normale leven niet verstoren, die men koestert omdat ze zeldzaam zijn en waarvan het verlies dieper zou kwetsen dan dat het bezit voldoening schenkt.”

— Gustave Flaubert

368. “He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.”

— Gustave Flaubert

369. “I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.”

— Gustave Flaubert

370. “As there was no rational foundation for Frederick’s complaints, and as he could not give evidence of any real misfortune, Martinon was unable to understand his lamentations about existence. As for him, he went every morning to the school, after that took a walk in the Luxembourg, in the evening swallowed his half-cup of coffee; and with fifteen hundred francs a year, and the love of this work-woman, he felt perfectly happy.”

— Gustave Flaubert

371. “Rich or poor, victors or vanquished, I make no allowance for any of them. I don’t want love or hate, pity or anger. Sympathy is another matter. There is never enough of that.”

— Gustave Flaubert

372. “The hearts of women are like little pieces of furniture wherein things are secreted, full of drawers fitted into each other; one hurts himself, breaks his nails in opening them, and then finds within only some withered flower, a few grains of dust – or emptiness! And then perhaps he felt afraid of learning too much about the matter.”

— Gustave Flaubert

373. “When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not experience as of believing anything that did not present itself in conventional forms she persuaded herself without difficulty that Charles’s passion was nothing very exorbitant.”

— Gustave Flaubert

374. “A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him.”

— Gustave Flaubert

375. “However, all this reading had disturbed their brains.”

— Gustave Flaubert

376. “Madame Bovary was nog nooit zo mooi geweest als nu; zij bezat de raadselachtige schoonheid die uit vreugde, geestdrift en succes voortspruit, een schoonheid die ontstaat wanneer de aard van het wezen harmonieert met de uiterlijke omstandigheden.”

— Gustave Flaubert

377. “Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that’s the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.”

— Gustave Flaubert

378. “Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer. With her black hair, her large eyes, her aquiline nose, her birdlike walk, and always silent now, did she not seem to be passing through life scarcely touching it, and to bear on her brow the vague impress of some divine destiny? She was so sad and so calm, at once so gentle and so reserved, that near her one felt oneself seized by an icy charm, as we shudder in churches at the perfume of the flowers mingling with the cold of the marble.”

— Gustave Flaubert

379. “Accustomed to the tranquil side of nature, she sought the dramatic in its stead. She loved the sea only for its storms, and the green grass only when it grew in patches among ruins.”

— Gustave Flaubert

380. “Before her marriage, she had believed that what she was experiencing was love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from that love had not come, she thought she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words bliss, passion, and intoxication, which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.”

— Gustave Flaubert

381. “It seemed to her that certain places on the earth must yield happiness, like a plant peculiar to that soil and growing poorly anywhere else.”

— Gustave Flaubert

382. “First he anointed her eyes, once so covetous of all earthly luxuries; then her nostrils, so gluttonous of caressing breezes and amorous scents; then her mouth, so prompt to lie, so defiant in pride, so loud in lust; then her hands that had thrilled to voluptuous contacts; and finally the soles of her feet, once so swift when she had hastened to slake her desires, and now never to walk again.”

— Gustave Flaubert

383. “La parole est un laminoir qui allonge toujours les sentiments.”

— Gustave Flaubert

384. “There was a diabolical effrontery in her fiery eyes, the heavy eyelids that drooped suggestively, persuasively, and the young man felt himself weakening beneath the silent willpower of this woman who was asking him to commit a crime.”

— Gustave Flaubert

385. “The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and count everything else as nothing.”

— Gustave Flaubert

386. “The tenderness of the old days came back to their hearts, full and silent as the flowing river, with the softness of the perfume of the syringas, and threw across their memories shadows more immense and more sombre than those of the still willows that lengthened out over the grass.”

— Gustave Flaubert

387. “Love, she believed, should come on all at once, with great claps of thunder and lightning – a hurricane from heaven that falls upon your life, turns it topsy-turvy, tears up intentions like leaves and sweeps your whole heart into the abyss.”

— Gustave Flaubert

388. “What!” said he. “Do you not know that there are souls constantly tormented? They need by turns to dream and to act, the purest passions and the most turbulent joys, and thus they fling themselves into all sorts of fantasies, of follies.”

— Gustave Flaubert

389. “This man could teach you nothing; he knew nothing, he wished for nothing. He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought to him.”

— Gustave Flaubert

390. “Homais, as was due to his principles, compared priests to ravens attracted by the odour of death. The sight of an ecclesiastic was personally disagreeable to him, for the cassock made him think of the shroud, and he detested the one from some fear of the other.”

— Gustave Flaubert

391. “One need not possess joys in order to taste their bitterness! Even to view them from afar off begets loathing of them. Thou must be fatigued by the monotony of the same actions, the length of the days, the hideousness of the world, the stupidity of the sun?”

— Gustave Flaubert

392. “Maar zij werd verteerd door verlangen, door woede en wrok.”

— Gustave Flaubert

393. “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. At once inert and flexible, she has against her the weakness of the flesh and legal dependence. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, held by a string, flutters in every wind; there is always some desire that draws her, some conventionality that restrains.”

— Gustave Flaubert

394. “Would this misery last for ever? Was there no escape? Was she not quite as good as all the lucky women? She had seen duchesses at La Vaubyessard with clumsier waists and commoner ways than she; she cursed the injustice of God. She propped her head against the wall and wept, for envy of those hectic lives, the shameless pleasure-seeking, the masked balls, and all the wild delights, unknown to her, that they must afford.”

— Gustave Flaubert

395. “I was born longing to die.”

— Gustave Flaubert

396. “Shake the vermin from thy rags! Rise up from thy filth! Thy god is not a moloch who demands human flesh in sacrifice!”

— Gustave Flaubert

397. “She wants to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work. If she were obliged, like so many others, to earn her living, she wouldn’t have these vapours, that come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her head, and from the idleness in which she lives.”

— Gustave Flaubert

398. “Dietro le Tuileries, il cielo si tingeva di ardesia, gli alberi del giardino formavano due masse enormi, violacee in alto. Si accendevano i lampioni a gas, e la Senna, verdastra in tutta la sua estensione, si lacerava in un marezzo d’argento contro i pilastri del ponte.”

— Gustave Flaubert

399. “Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.”

— Gustave Flaubert

400. “If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.”

— Gustave Flaubert