Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Beautiful things spoil nothing.

Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.

There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.

Snicker on hearing his name: 'the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.'

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.

There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.

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.

And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.

Madame Bovary is myself.

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.

And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.

Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?

Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.

I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world.

Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.

We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.

May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!

To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.

What is glory? It is to have a lot of nonsense talked about you.

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

Adultery ... could be as banal as marriage.

Everything is there: the love of Art.

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.

One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being.

Talent is a long patience.

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.

Antiquite . en tout ce qui s'y rapporte: Est poncif, embe" tant! etc. Antiquity. And everything to do with it, cliche d and boring.

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?

By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.

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

We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself!

Reveal art; conceal the artist.

I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all

It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.

Art is nothing without form.

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.