Top 450 Gustave Flaubert Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

402. “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

403. “As a child I loved what can be seen, as a teenager what can be felt, as a man I no longer love anything.”

— Gustave Flaubert

404. “She forgot the tune of the quadrilles; she no longer saw the liveries and appointments so distinctly; some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her.”

— Gustave Flaubert

405. “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

406. “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

407. “Their great love, in which she lived totally immersed, seemed to be subsiding around her, like the river sinking into its bed... and she could see the mud at the bottom.”

— Gustave Flaubert

408. “A man, at any rate, is free. He can explore the passions and the continents, can surmount obstacles, reach out to the most distant joys. Whereas a woman is constantly thwarted. At once inert and pliant, she has to contend with both physical weakness and legal subordination. Her will is like the veil on her bonnet, fastened by a single string and quivering at every breeze that blows. Always there is a desire that impels and a convention that restrains.”

— Gustave Flaubert

409. “Elle aurait voulu ne plus vivre, ou continuellement dormir.”

— Gustave Flaubert

410. “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

411. “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

412. “She had purchased for herself a blotting-case, stationery, a penholder and some envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she wiped the dust off her shelves, looked at herself in the mirror, took down a book, then, dreaming between the lines, let it fall in her lap. She had a desire to travel, or to go back and live at her convent. She wished both to die and to live in Paris.”

— Gustave Flaubert

413. “As to texts, look at history; it, is known that all the texts have been falsified by the Jesuits.”

— Gustave Flaubert

414. “BALLOONS – With balloons we will end up going to the moon. We shan’t be able to navigate them any time soon.”

— Gustave Flaubert

415. “Het woord is trouwens net een mangel die gevoelens gladstrijkt.”

— Gustave Flaubert

416. “Her desires, her sorrows, the experience of pleasure, and her ever-young illusions, that had, as soil and rain and winds and the sun make flowers grow, gradually developed her, and she at length blossomed forth in all the plenitude of her nature.”

— Gustave Flaubert

417. “He remembers with disdain the ignorance of other days, the mediocrity of his dreams. And now those luminous globes he was wont to gaze upon from below are close to him!”

— Gustave Flaubert

418. “The reminiscences, far too numerous, on which he dwelt produced a disheartening effect on him; he went no further with the work, and his mental vacuity redoubled.”

— Gustave Flaubert

419. “ABSINTHE – Extra-violent poison: one glass and you are dead. Journalists drink it while writing their articles. Has killed more soldiers than the Bedouins.”

— Gustave Flaubert

420. “You!” she said in astonishment; “I thought you very light-hearted.” “Ah! yes. I seem so, because in the midst of the world I know how to wear the mask of a scoffer upon my face; and yet, how many a time at the sight of a cemetery by moonlight have I not asked myself whether it were not better to join those sleeping there!”

— Gustave Flaubert

421. “Un infini de passions peut tenir dans une minute, comme une foule dans un petit espace.”

— Gustave Flaubert

422. “In de muziekles zong zij liedjes over niets dan engeltjes met gouden vleugels, madonna’s, meren, gondeliers: rimpelloze romances die haar tussen de beuzelachtige woorden en de onbeholpen klanken door een korte blik vergunden op de betoverende wereld van de werkelijke sentimenten.”

— Gustave Flaubert

423. “At that time you were to me I know not what incomprehensible force that took captive my life.”

— Gustave Flaubert

424. “A blow lasts a minute but is anticipated for months – our passions are like volcanoes: always rumbling but only intermittently erupting.”

— Gustave Flaubert

425. “I was born longing to die.”

— Gustave Flaubert

426. “Anyway, what was the use? Women’s hearts were like those desks full of secret drawers that fit one inside another; you struggle with them, you break your fingernails, and at the bottom you find a withered flower, a little dust, or nothing at all!”

— Gustave Flaubert

427. “ART – Leads to the poorhouse. What’s the use of it, since we’re replacing it with machines that do better and work faster?”

— Gustave Flaubert

428. “And all the time, deep within her, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a shipwrecked sailor she scanned her solitude with desperate eyes for the sight of a white sail far off on the misty horizon. She had no idea what that chance would be, what wind would waft it to her, where it would set her ashore, whether it was a launch or a three-decker, laden with anguish or filled to the portholes with happiness. But every morning when she woke she hoped to find it there.”

— Gustave Flaubert

429. “All these great artists burn the candle at both ends; they require a dissolute life, that suits the imagination to some extent.”

— Gustave Flaubert

430. “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

431. “The head-master made a.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

433. “Argent. Cause de tout le mal.”

— Gustave Flaubert

434. “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

435. “Poor thing! She had loved him, after all.”

— Gustave Flaubert

436. “For you have doubtless done as I did at the age of fifteen, you have once thought you were in love with that burning and frenzied love of the kind you’ve seen in books, whereas all you were suffering from was just a slight scratch on the epidermis of your heart left by that iron claw called passion, and you were blowing with all the strength of your imagination on that modest fire that was barely even alight.”

— Gustave Flaubert

437. “Avrebbe voluto vivere in qualche vecchio maniero, come quelle castellane dal lungo corsetto che passavano le loro giornate sotto i trifogli delle ogive, col gomito sulla pietra e il mento appoggiato sulla mano, a veder arrivare, dall’estremo orizzonte della campagna, un cavaliere dalla piuma bianca galoppante su un cavallo nero!”

— Gustave Flaubert

438. “But her own life was as cold as an attic with a north-facing window, and boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of.”

— Gustave Flaubert

439. “Ascend skyward forever and forever,–yet thou wilt not attain the summit. Descend below the earth for billions of billions of centuries: never wilt thou reach the bottom. For there is no summit, there is no bottom; there is no Above, no Below – there is no end.”

— Gustave Flaubert

440. “It seemed as if she went through life touching it scarcely at all.”

— Gustave Flaubert

441. “The raging desire to come to a final conclusion is one the most deadly and sterile obsessions that belong to humanity. Every religion and philosophy has made claims to its own God, to have touched the infinite, to have discovered the recipe for happiness. What pride and what emptiness! To the contrary, I see that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works don’t come to final conclusions.”

— Gustave Flaubert

442. “All that people have found fault with as exaggerated in fiction you have made me feel.”

— Gustave Flaubert

443. “So that was all love was! That was all a woman was! Good Lord, why do we still hunger even when we are sated? Why so many aspirations and so many disappointments? Why is man’s heart so big and life so small? There are days when even the love of the angels would not suffice it, and in a single hour it grows weary of all the caresses of earth.”

— Gustave Flaubert

444. “As a child I dreamt of love – as a young man of fame – as a man, of the tomb, that last love of those who have no love left.”

— Gustave Flaubert

445. “For a week he was seen going to church in the evening. Monsieur Bournisien even paid him two or three visits, then gave him up. Moreover, the old fellow was growing intolerant, fanatic, said Homais. He thundered against the spirit of the age, and never failed, every other week, in his sermon, to recount the death agony of Voltaire, who died devouring his excrements, as everyone knows.”

— Gustave Flaubert

446. “Emma, who had taken his arm, bent lightly against his shoulder, and she looked at the sun’s disc shedding afar through the mist his pale splendour.”

— Gustave Flaubert

447. “One must not touch idols; the gilt rubs off on one’s hands.”

— Gustave Flaubert

448. “Anyone who lacks respect for religion comes to a bad end.”

— Gustave Flaubert

449. “Everybody can’t be rich! No fortune can hold out against waste!”

— Gustave Flaubert

450. “On his table he piled up humanists, philosophers, and poets. He went to the print room to look at the engravings of Marcantonio. He tried to understand Machiavelli. Gradually the soothing nature of the work calmed him. And delving into the personalities of others he forgot his own, which is perhaps the only way to avoid suffering from it.”

— Gustave Flaubert