Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting.

And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

Sadness is a vice.

Travel, leave everything, copy the birds. The home is one of civilization’s sadnesses.

Self-confidence depends on environment: one does not speak in the same tone in the drawing room than in the kitchen.

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

But vilifying those we love always detaches us from them a little. We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.

Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands.

Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.

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?

Charles went to kiss her shoulder.-Leave me alone! she said, you're creasing my dress.

Some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her.

Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker.

Irony takes nothing away from pathos.

Read in oreder to live

Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.

Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

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 are metaphors.

The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fin

Speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.

Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

This haze of blood must subside, the palace must collapse under the weight of the riches it conceals, the orgy must finish and the time come to awaken.

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.

When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from above?

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.