Welcome to the collection of Gustave Flaubert Quotes! Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist and a leading figure in the realist movement of the 19th century. His works, such as Madame Bovary, have had a lasting impact on literature and culture. Here, you will find some of his most famous and inspiring quotes, which are sure to make you think and reflect.
Gustave Flaubert Quotes Celebrating Travel, Life and Writing
⚫“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live. Like, Yourself.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancholies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.” – Gustave Flaubert
“Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“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
⚫“One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“Read in order to live.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫““He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings.
⚫“It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“God is in the details.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“To be simple is no small matter.” – Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert quotes that will change the way you think
⚫“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!” – Gustave Flaubert
Inspirational Gustave Flaubert quotes
⚫“By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea–of an ideal.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
⚫“I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“I have dreamed much and have done very little.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.” – Gustave Flaubert
“Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“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
⚫“The principal thing in this world is to keep one’s soul aloft.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“There is no truth. There is only perception.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.” – Gustave Flaubert
⚫“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
Gustave Flaubert Quotes About Age
⚫“It seems to me… that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions… My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.”
⚫“Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.”
⚫“We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep”
Gustave Flaubert Quotes About Art
⚫“A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.”
⚫“Art is nothing without form.”
⚫“Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.”
⚫“As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.”
⚫“Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.”
⚫“Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea–of an ideal.”
⚫“Everything is there: the love of Art.”
⚫“I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.”
⚫“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.”
⚫“I took Eugene Sue’s Arthur from the reading-room. It’s indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking.”
⚫“It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.”
“Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.
⚫“Of all lies, art is the least untrue.”
⚫“On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.”
⚫“One mustn’t always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.”
⚫“Reveal art; conceal the artist.”
⚫“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”
⚫“The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.”
⚫“The morality of art is in its very beauty.”
⚫“The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.”
⚫“The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.”
⚫“There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.”
⚫“What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air–a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.”
⚫“What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.”
⚫“You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.”
⚫“You don’t make art out of good intentions.”
Gustave Flaubert Quotes About Books
⚫“And indeed, what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?”
⚫“Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” – words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.”
⚫“Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.”
⚫“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
⚫“He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.”
⚫“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.”
⚫“Madame Aubain’s servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l’Eveque for half a century.”
⚫“Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.”
⚫“Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.”
⚫“Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.”
⚫“She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.”
⚫“The citadel of Machaerus rose east of the Dead Sea on a basalt Peak shaped like a cone, girdled by four deep valleys; two about its sides, one in front, and the fourth behind.”
⚫“The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.”
⚫“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.”
⚫“What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright…Haven’t you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you’ve had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?”
⚫“What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air–a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.”
⚫“What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.”
“Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.”
Gustave Flaubert Quotes About Dreams
⚫“By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream.”
⚫“Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea–of an ideal.”
⚫“Emma was no asleep, she was pretending to be asleep; and, while he was dozing off at her side, she lay awake, dreaming other dreams.”
⚫“He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides.”
⚫“I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.”
⚫“If you knew all the dreams I’ve dreamed!”
⚫“In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on.”
⚫“My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else’s – monotonous, sensible, stupid.”
⚫“She remembered the heroines of novels she had read, and the lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. Now she saw herself as one of those amoureuses whom she had so envied: she was becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures; the long dream of her youth was coming true.”
⚫“The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.”
⚫“Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?”
⚫“We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep.”
Gustave Flaubert Quotes About Heart
⚫“After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.”
⚫“Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.”
⚫“As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.”
“Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.”
⚫“Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea–of an ideal.”
⚫“For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.
⚫“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.”
⚫“Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!”
⚫“How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.”
⚫“I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.”
⚫“Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,–a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.”
⚫“Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.”
⚫“The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.”
⚫“The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding – places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust – or emptiness!”
⚫“The style, which is something I take to heart, is getting on my nerves horribly. It frustrates and torments me. I have days when Iam sick about it and nights when it gives me a fever. The more I go at it the more I find myself incapable of conveying the Idea.”
⚫“Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.”
⚫“You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.”
⚫“You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.”
Gustave Flaubert Quotes About Literature
⚫“A memory is a beautiful thing, it’s almost a desire that you miss.”
⚫“A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.”
⚫“Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.”
⚫“Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.”
⚫“Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.”
⚫“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
⚫“I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.”
⚫“I took Eugene Sue’s Arthur from the reading-room. It’s indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking.”
⚫“It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.”
⚫“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.”
⚫“Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
Madame Bovary is myself.”
⚫“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.”
⚫“Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.”
⚫“One mustn’t always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.”
⚫“Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.”
⚫“Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.”
⚫“The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.”
⚫“The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.”
⚫“The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.”
⚫“The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.”
⚫“The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.”
⚫“The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.”
⚫“There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.”
⚫“Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.”
⚫“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.”
Gustave Flaubert Quotes About Soul
⚫“The truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
⚫“Doesn’t it seem to you,” asked Madame Bovary, “that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?
⚫“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.”
⚫“How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.”
⚫“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.”
⚫“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.”
⚫“I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.”
⚫“Mediocrity cherishes rules; as for me, I hate them; I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.”
⚫“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.”
⚫“The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.”
⚫“The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.”
⚫“There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me.”
⚫“You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.”
Gustave Flaubert Quotes About Writing
⚫“A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.”
⚫“Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.”
⚫“I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.”
⚫“I took Eugene Sue’s Arthur from the reading-room. It’s indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking.”
⚫“It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.”
⚫“It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.”
⚫“Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.”
⚫“It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.”
⚫“My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.”
⚫“One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.”
⚫“Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.”
⚫“Talent is long patience.”
⚫“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”
⚫“The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.”
⚫“There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more.”
⚫“What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air–a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.”
⚫“What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.”
⚫“Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.”
⚫“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women.”
⚫“Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.”
⚫“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.”
⚫“Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.”
⚫“You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.”
Motivational Gustave Flaubert Quotes
⚫“I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports. When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.”
⚫“Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.”
⚫“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
⚫“I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.”
⚫“One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.”
⚫“One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.”
⚫“Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.”
⚫“Talent is nothing but long patience.”
⚫“The principal thing in this world is to keep one’s soul aloft.”
⚫“There is no truth. There is only perception.”
⚫“To be simple is no small matter.”
⚫“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
Gustave Flaubert Quotes on Stupidity
⚫“Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.”
⚫“Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.”
⚫“Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.”
⚫“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”
Gustave Flaubert Quotes on History
⚫“Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.”
⚫“Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.”
Gustave Flaubert on Women
⚫“The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding – places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust – or emptiness!”
⚫“We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep.”
⚫“Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.”
Gustave Flaubert Quotes To Ponder
⚫“After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.”
⚫“Mediocrity cherishes rules; as for me, I hate them; I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.”
⚫“A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.”
⚫“A memory is a beautiful thing, it’s almost a desire that you miss.”
⚫“All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.”
⚫“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”
⚫“But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.”
⚫“For him, the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.”
⚫“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
⚫“I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.”
⚫“I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.”
⚫“I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”
⚫“It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.”
⚫“Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.”
⚫“One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.”
⚫“One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.”
⚫“Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”
⚫“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”
⚫“The author, in his work, must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”
⚫“The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.”
⚫“The future is the worst thing about the present.”
⚫“The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.”
⚫“We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity. I think that’s what being really human means.”
⚫“What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!”
Gustave Flaubert Quotes About Universe
⚫“For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.”
⚫“It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.”
⚫“Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.”
⚫“My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing words, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called science.”
⚫“The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”
Gustave Flaubert Quotes About Virtue
⚫“A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.”
⚫“As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.”
⚫“Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.”
Verdict
Gustave Flaubert Quotes are still relevant today and serve as a reminder of his wisdom and insight into the human condition. His words are a source of inspiration and motivation for us all, and can help us to better understand ourselves and the world around us.