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He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought him. -- Gustave Flaubert
I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later! -- Gustave Flaubert
The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go to a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness! -- Gustave Flaubert
Lively once, expansive and affectionate, in growing older she had become (after the fashion of wine that, exposed to air, turns to vinegar) ill-tempered, grumbling, irritable. She -- Gustave Flaubert
A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset. -- Gustave Flaubert
She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions. -- Gustave Flaubert
That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust. -- Gustave Flaubert
[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight. -- Gustave Flaubert
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
I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings. -- Gustave Flaubert
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
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
On spinach: I dislike it, and am happy to dislike it because if I liked it I would eat it, and I cannot stand it. -- Gustave Flaubert
I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world -- Gustave Flaubert
A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies. -- Gustave Flaubert
Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal. -- Gustave Flaubert
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything -- Gustave Flaubert
Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can't stiffen up enough to create them. -- Gustave Flaubert
For her, life was as cold as an attic with a window looking to the north, and ennui, like a spider, was silently spinning its shadowy web in every cranny of her heart. -- Gustave Flaubert
But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart. -- Gustave Flaubert
She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins. -- Gustave Flaubert
To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason. -- Gustave Flaubert
The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers. -- Gustave Flaubert
Happy are they whose pens fly across the page; I myself hesitate, I falter. I become angry and fearful. My drive diminishes as my taste improves. I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well proportioned paragraph. -- Gustave Flaubert
Sadness is a vice. -- Gustave Flaubert
Travel, leave everything, copy the birds. The home is one of civilization's sadnesses. -- Gustave Flaubert
She put him near the front door and a number of visitors were surprised that he would not answer to the name 'Polly', which is what all parrots were supposed to be called. -- Gustave Flaubert
My novel is the rock to which I cling and I know nothing of what is taking place in the world. -- Gustave Flaubert
Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth. -- Gustave Flaubert
Standing side by side, on some rising ground, they felt, as they drank in the air, the pride of a life more free penetrating into the depths of their souls, with a superabundance of energy, a joy which they could not explain. -- Gustave Flaubert
What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write. -- Gustave Flaubert
A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man. -- Gustave Flaubert
She remembered the summer evenings all full of sunshine. The colts neighed when any one passed by, and galloped, galloped. Under her window there was a beehive, and sometimes the bees wheeling round in the light struck against her window like rebounding balls of gold. -- Gustave Flaubert
I can't believe that our body, composed as it is of mud and shit and equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig or the crab-louse, contains anything pure and immaterial -- Gustave Flaubert
Emma repeated to herself, "Good Heavens! Why did I marry? -- Gustave Flaubert
We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself! -- Gustave Flaubert
When you are some-'one', why would you wish to be some-'thing'? -- Gustave Flaubert
Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments. -- Gustave Flaubert
How wonderful to find in living creatures the same substance as those which make up minerals. Nevertheless they felt a sort of humiliation at the idea that their persons contained phosphorous like matches, albumen like white of egg, hydrogen gas like street lamps. -- Gustave Flaubert
Love, she believed, must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightening - a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart with it off into the abyss. -- Gustave Flaubert
Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art. -- Gustave Flaubert
Snicker on hearing his name: 'the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.' -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
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? -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
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 -- Gustave Flaubert
I refuse to consider Art a drain-pipe for passion, a kind of chamberpot, a slightly more elegant substitute for gossip and confidences. No, no! Genuine poetry is not the scum of the heart. -- Gustave Flaubert
It's hard to communicate anything exactly and that's why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find. -- Gustave Flaubert
Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase. -- Gustave Flaubert
But what was making her unhappy? Where was the extraordinary catastrophe that had wrecked her life?She raised her head and looked around, as though trying to find the cause of her suffering. -- Gustave Flaubert
But I have gone back to work; I try to intoxicate myself with ink, the way others intoxicate themselves with brandy, so as to forget the public disasters and my private sorrows. -- Gustave Flaubert
For now he was in one of those crises when the soul yields a blurred glimpse of all that it enfolds, like an ocean, tempest-torn, uncovering everything from the seaweed in the shallows to the sands of the abyss. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in! -- Gustave Flaubert
Everyone became brave from excess of terror. -- Gustave Flaubert
In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed. -- Gustave Flaubert
Bourgeois do not even suspect that we serve them our hearts. The race of gladiators has not died: every artist is one. He amuses the public with his afflictions. -- Gustave Flaubert
Then a faintness came over her; she recalled the Viscount who had waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this air an odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes the better to breathe it in. But -- Gustave Flaubert
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy. -- Gustave Flaubert
Beautiful things spoil nothing. -- Gustave Flaubert
The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. -- Gustave Flaubert
This was how they wished they had been: each was creating an ideal into which he was now fitting his past life. -- Gustave Flaubert
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry. -- Gustave Flaubert
So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks! -- Gustave Flaubert
I was resting in the shadow of that ideal happiness as in the shade of the poisonous manchineel tree, without foreseeing the consequences. -- Gustave Flaubert
the clang of the band, letting loose, rang out like a brass kettle rolling downstairs, -- Gustave Flaubert
You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
Why was it? Who drove you to it?'
She replied, 'It had to be, my dear!'
'Weren't you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could!'
'Yes, that is true - you are good - you. -- Gustave Flaubert
I lead a bitter life, devoid of all external joy and in which I have nothing to keep me going but a sort of permanent rage, which weeps at times from impotence, but which is constant. -- Gustave Flaubert
Art is nothing without form. -- Gustave Flaubert
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs. -- Gustave Flaubert
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
What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love. -- Gustave Flaubert
At last she sighed.
But the most wretched thing - is it not? - is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice. -- Gustave Flaubert
Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away. -- Gustave Flaubert
There is a place they call La Pature, on the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset. -- Gustave Flaubert
My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real. -- Gustave Flaubert
The world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. We're lucky to be living now. -- Gustave Flaubert
One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being. -- Gustave Flaubert
Reveal art; conceal the artist. -- Gustave Flaubert
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
His heart was flooded with immense love, and as he gazed on her he could feel his mind growing numb. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings. -- Gustave Flaubert
How oft the warmth of the sun above
Makes a pretty young girl dream of love. -- Gustave Flaubert
After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again. -- Gustave Flaubert
Oh, why, dear God, did I marry him? -- Gustave Flaubert
What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing. -- Gustave Flaubert
I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times ... The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them. -- Gustave Flaubert
The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of
I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters
I live and breathe them. -- Gustave Flaubert
The most important thing is to keep the Soul aloft -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously? -- Gustave Flaubert
Have you ever had the experience of finding in a book some vague idea that's already occurred to you, some obscure image that comes back to you from the depths of your mind, or a perfect expression of your most subtle feelings? -- Gustave Flaubert
And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light. -- Gustave Flaubert
It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling. -- Gustave Flaubert
The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it. -- Gustave Flaubert
One event sometimes had infinite ramifications and could change the whole settings of a person's life. -- Gustave Flaubert
Human Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity. -- Gustave Flaubert
Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity. -- Gustave Flaubert
There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going. -- Gustave Flaubert
Success as I see it is a result, not a goal. -- 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
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
Prose is like hair; it shines with combing. -- Gustave Flaubert
If we knew how our body is made, we wouldn't dare move. -- Gustave Flaubert
He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex. -- Gustave Flaubert
Surely it could not have been a dove God had chosen to speak through, since doves could not talk. -- Gustave Flaubert
This is indeed a funny country. Yesterday, for example, we were in a cafe which is one of the best in Cairo, and there were, at the same time as ourselves, inside, a donkey shitting, and a gentleman who was pissing in a corner. No one finds that odd; no one says anything. -- Gustave Flaubert
Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker. -- Gustave Flaubert
What exasperated her was that Charles seemed to have no notion of her torment. His conviction that he was making her happy struck her as impudent imbecility, his uxorious complacency as ingratitude. -- 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
The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame. -- Gustave Flaubert
Everything is there: the love of Art. -- 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
The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family. -- Gustave Flaubert
Charles' conversation was as flat as a street pavement, on which everybody's ideas trudged past, in their workaday dress, provoking no emotion, no laughter, no dreams. -- Gustave Flaubert
In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn't fill him with the same enthusiasm -- Gustave Flaubert
Isn't 'not to be bored' one of the principal goals of life? -- Gustave Flaubert
Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn't that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire? -- Gustave Flaubert
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
If you want to be happy, it is necessary not to be too intelligent. -- Gustave Flaubert
I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head. -- Gustave Flaubert
His eagerness had turned into a routine; he embraced her at the same time every day. It was a habit like any other, a favourite pudding after the monotony of dinner. -- Gustave Flaubert
The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. -- Gustave Flaubert
I'm the sort of man who's doomed to be a failure and I'll go to my grave without ever knowing whether I was real gold or just tinsel! -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act. -- Gustave Flaubert
The new delight of independence soon made his loneliness bearable. -- Gustave Flaubert
For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries. -- Gustave Flaubert
The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror -- Gustave Flaubert
The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness. -- Gustave Flaubert
Talent is long patience. -- Gustave Flaubert
received the cross of the Legion of Honour. -- Gustave Flaubert
Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom -- Gustave Flaubert
She devoutly put away in her drawers her beautiful dress, down to the satin shoes whose soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor. Her heart was like these. In its friction against wealth something had come over it that could not be effaced. -- Gustave Flaubert
Oh, if somewhere there were a being strong and handsome, a valiant heart, passionate and sensitive at once, a poet's spirit in an angel's form, a lyre with strings of steel, sounding sweet-sad epithalamiums to the heavens, then why should she not find that being? -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel. -- Gustave Flaubert
His wife had been wild about him at first; she had treated him with an amorous servility that had turned him against her all the more. Vivacious, effusive, and very loving in the early days, over the years she had, like a stale wine that turns to vinegar, grown ill-humoured, waspish, and nervy. -- Gustave Flaubert
Of all lies, art is the least untrue. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
To be simple is no small matter. -- Gustave Flaubert
Iced champagne was poured out. Emma shivered all over as she felt it cold in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates nor tasted pine-apples. The powdered sugar even seemed to her whiter and finer than elsewhere. -- Gustave Flaubert
and now, their great love, in which she dwelt immersed, seemed to dwindle beneath her, like the waters that vanish into the bed of the river, and she could see the mud. -- Gustave Flaubert
It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don't get horny enough to actually to father them. -- Gustave Flaubert
For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat. -- Gustave Flaubert
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
In her desire, she confused the sensual pleasures of luxury with the joys of the heart, elegance of manner with delicacy of feeling. -- Gustave Flaubert
(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
What's improper about it?" retorted the clerk. "Everybody does it in Paris!" It was an irresistible and conclusive argument. -- Gustave Flaubert
Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again. -- Gustave Flaubert
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it. -- 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
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous. -- Gustave Flaubert
Thought is the greatest of pleasures - pleasure itself is only imagination - have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams? -- Gustave Flaubert
One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes. -- Gustave Flaubert
Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting. -- Gustave Flaubert
I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it. -- Gustave Flaubert
All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful. -- Gustave Flaubert
By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men. -- Gustave Flaubert
So when will this society, bastardised by every debauchery of mind, body and
soul, finally come to an end? -- Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary is myself. -- Gustave Flaubert
The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed. -- Gustave Flaubert
Self-possession depends on its environment. -- Gustave Flaubert
Well, quite softly, one day following another, a spring on a winter, and an autumn after a summer, this wore away, piece by piece, crumb by crumb; it passed away, it is gone, I should say it has sunk; for something always remains at the bottom as one would say - a weight here, at one's heart. -- Gustave Flaubert
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough. -- Gustave Flaubert
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key. -- Gustave Flaubert
Future joys are like tropical shores; like a fragrant breeze, they extend their innate softness to the immense inland world of past experience, and we are lulled by this intoxication into forgetting the unseen horizons beyond. -- Gustave Flaubert
The head-master made a sign to us to sit down. Then, turning to the class-master, he said to him in a low voice - -- Gustave Flaubert
The public wants work which flatters its illusions. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act. -- Gustave Flaubert
There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni. -- Gustave Flaubert
She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague "she" of all the poetry books. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
L'Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
Speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment. -- Gustave Flaubert
Irony takes nothing away from pathos. -- Gustave Flaubert
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling. -- Gustave Flaubert
England and Brittany were places one came back from. But America, the colonies, and the Antilles were lost in some unknown region on the other side of the world. -- Gustave Flaubert
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 -- Gustave Flaubert
I detest common heroes and moderate feelings, the sort that exist in real life -- Gustave Flaubert
What could be better than to sit besides the fire with a book and a glowing lamp while the wind beats outside the windows... -- Gustave Flaubert
God is in the details. -- Gustave Flaubert
I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all -- Gustave Flaubert
Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion. -- Gustave Flaubert
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. -- Gustave Flaubert
On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us. -- Gustave Flaubert
Casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands. -- Gustave Flaubert
Cheer up,' said the captain's son. 'Life is long, and we are young. -- Gustave Flaubert
This splendid vision dwelt in her memory as the most beautiful thing that it was possible to dream, so that now she strove to recall her sensation. That still lasted, however, but in a less exclusive fashion and with a deeper sweetness. Her soul, tortured by -- Gustave Flaubert
She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die. -- Gustave Flaubert
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. -- Gustave Flaubert
A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss. -- Gustave Flaubert
Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century. -- Gustave Flaubert
Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles. -- Gustave Flaubert
This man, who was so experienced in love, couldn't distinguish the dissimilarity in the emotions, behind the similarity of the expressions. -- Gustave Flaubert
Be selfish, stupid and have good health. But if stupidity is lacking, then all is lost.
Flaubert's dictum for getting through life unscathed. -- Gustave Flaubert
Exuberance is better than taste. -- Gustave Flaubert
Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expected to find it. -- Gustave Flaubert
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.
-- Gustave Flaubert
What vast funds of indifference society possesses -- Gustave Flaubert
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels. -- Gustave Flaubert
Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know. -- Gustave Flaubert
The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence. -- Gustave Flaubert
It was all her fortune. It seemed to her very fine thus to throw it away. -- Gustave Flaubert
In March 1853 she was afflicted with a pain in the chest; her tongue seemed to be covered with a film; leeches failed to make her breathing any easier. -- Gustave Flaubert
As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop. -- Gustave Flaubert
I'm dazzled by your facility. In ten days you'll have written six stories! I don't understand it ... I'm like one of those old aqueducts: there's so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop. -- Gustave Flaubert
Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose somber depths turn us faint ... Yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness. -- Gustave Flaubert
The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves. -- Gustave Flaubert
Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature. -- Gustave Flaubert
You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful. -- Gustave Flaubert
When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say the
way God sees events from above? -- Gustave Flaubert
You don't make art out of good intentions. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room -- Gustave Flaubert
Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living. -- Gustave Flaubert
When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women -- Gustave Flaubert
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. -- Gustave Flaubert
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe. -- Gustave Flaubert
One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table. -- Gustave Flaubert
Writing is a dog's life, but the only one worth living. -- Gustave Flaubert
Come, let's be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer. -- Gustave Flaubert
He leaned against the writing desk and stayed there till nightfall, lost in sorrowful thoughts. After all, she had loved him. -- Gustave Flaubert
Such killings were part of the natural order of things, an inevitable consequence of belonging to a royal household. -- Gustave Flaubert
When she was taken too bad she went off quite alone to the sea-shore, so that the customs officer, going his rounds, often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle. Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say." "But with me," replied Emma, "it was after marriage that it began. -- Gustave Flaubert
The mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the idea? -- Gustave Flaubert
Those who were beginning to grow old had an air of youth, while there was something mature in the faces of the young. -- Gustave Flaubert
Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders. -- Gustave Flaubert
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live. -- Gustave Flaubert
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 -- Gustave Flaubert
It is so sweet, amid all the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris. -- Gustave Flaubert
Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions. -- Gustave Flaubert
Sorrow rushed into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in abandoned manor houses. -- Gustave Flaubert
Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitterness. -- Gustave Flaubert
But how nothingness invades us! We are scarcely born ere decay begins for us, in such a way that the whole of life is but one long combat with it, more and more triumphant, on its part, to the consummation, namely, death; and then the reign of decay is exclusive. -- Gustave Flaubert
We must not touch our idols; the gilt sticks to our fingers. -- Gustave Flaubert
Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom. -- Gustave Flaubert
But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted. -- Gustave Flaubert
It seemed to her that certain parts of the world must produce happiness as they produced peculiar plants which will flourish nowhere else. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois. -- Gustave Flaubert
On the Place she met Lestivoudois on his way back, for, in order not to shorten his day's labour, he preferred interrupting his work, then beginning it again, so that he rang the Angelus to suit his own convenience. Besides, the ringing over a little earlier warned the lads of catechism hour. -- Gustave Flaubert
She only wished to lean on something more solid than love. -- Gustave Flaubert
Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art. -- Gustave Flaubert
Self-confidence depends on environment: one does not speak in the same tone in the drawing room than in the kitchen. -- Gustave Flaubert
There's a fundamental stupidity in mankind which is as eternal as life itself. -- Gustave Flaubert
Charles went to kiss her shoulder.
-Leave me alone! she said, you're creasing my dress. -- Gustave Flaubert
I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is. -- Gustave Flaubert
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage. -- Gustave Flaubert
...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art. -- Gustave Flaubert
She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep. -- Gustave Flaubert
Read in order to live. -- Gustave Flaubert
The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect. -- Gustave Flaubert
What is glory? It is to have a lot of nonsense talked about you. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly. -- Gustave Flaubert
Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet. -- Gustave Flaubert
You can't find the soul with a scalpel. -- Gustave Flaubert
Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness. -- Gustave Flaubert
I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world. -- Gustave Flaubert
He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides -- Gustave Flaubert
Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.
(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.) -- Gustave Flaubert
What an awful thing life is, isn't it? It's like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless. -- Gustave Flaubert
I do not like to "interest" the public with myself. -- Gustave Flaubert
This sense of my own weakness and emptiness comforts me. I feel myself a mere speck of dust lost in space, yet I am part of that endless grandeur which envelopes me. I could never see why that should be cause for despair, since there could very well be nothing at all behind the black curtain. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
Some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her. -- Gustave Flaubert
We aren't there yet,' said Bouvard.
Let's hope not,' said Pecuchet. -- Gustave Flaubert
On the grave among the pine trees, a boy knelt weeping, his chest, racked by sobs, heaving in the darkness, oppressed by an immense grief gentler than the moon and more unfathomable than the night. -- Gustave Flaubert
Emma still had a joyless look, and, habitually, at the corners of her mouth, she had that tightness that crumples the faces of old maids and bankrupts. -- Gustave Flaubert
People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along. -- Gustave Flaubert
The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft. -- Gustave Flaubert
In every parting there comes a moment when the beloved is already no longer with us. -- Gustave Flaubert
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 burning? -- Gustave Flaubert
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in. -- Gustave Flaubert
Everything measurable passes, everything that can be counted has an end. Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears. -- Gustave Flaubert
Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless. -- Gustave Flaubert
Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue. -- Gustave Flaubert
Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again. -- Gustave Flaubert
I wouldn't mind a bit seeing all civilization crumble like a mason's scaffolding before the building was finished
-- Gustave Flaubert
I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen. -- Gustave Flaubert
May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second! -- Gustave Flaubert
Her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart. -- Gustave Flaubert
If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answering that immoderate desire for the infinite and the vague that we call the soul, it is art. -- Gustave Flaubert
The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest. -- Gustave Flaubert
One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod. -- Gustave Flaubert
She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it was scattered among ruins. -- Gustave Flaubert
The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love. -- Gustave Flaubert
One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought! -- Gustave Flaubert
I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity. -- Gustave Flaubert
Emma was just like any other mistress; and the charm of novelty, falling down slowly like a dress, exposed only the eternal monotony of passion, always the same forms and the same language. -- Gustave Flaubert
Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence. -- Gustave Flaubert
Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings. -- Gustave Flaubert
Without moving, you walk through lands you imagine you can see, and your thoughts, weaving in and out of the story, delight in the details or follow the outlines of the adventures. You merge with the character; you think you're the one whose heart is beating so hard within the clothes he's wearing. -- Gustave Flaubert
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant. -- Gustave Flaubert
Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it. -- Gustave Flaubert
Pellerin used to read every available book on aesthetics, in the hope of discovering the true theory of Beauty, for he was convinced that once he had found it he would be able to paint masterpieces. -- Gustave Flaubert
Death always brings with it a kind of stupefaction, so difficult is it for the human mind to realize and resign itself to the blank and utter nothingness. -- Gustave Flaubert
For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet. -- Gustave Flaubert
Pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall. -- Gustave Flaubert
The morality of art is in its very beauty. -- Gustave Flaubert
... 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! -- Gustave Flaubert
Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid. -- Gustave Flaubert
What he then saw was like an apparition. She was seated in the middle of a bench all alone, or, at any rate, he could see no one, dazzled as he was by her eyes. -- Gustave Flaubert
It's no easy business to be simple. -- Gustave Flaubert
A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man. -- Gustave Flaubert
Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom. -- Gustave Flaubert
We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful! -- Gustave Flaubert
Talent is a long patience. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible. -- Gustave Flaubert
But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human. -- Gustave Flaubert
Human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars. -- Gustave Flaubert
Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile. -- Gustave Flaubert
It is a delicious thing to write, whether well or badly - to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. -- Gustave Flaubert
What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds! -- Gustave Flaubert
I have dreamed much and have done very little. -- Gustave Flaubert
Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex ... -- Gustave Flaubert
The more flowery a person's speech ... the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed. -- Gustave Flaubert
What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books. -- Gustave Flaubert
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness. -- Gustave Flaubert
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use. -- Gustave Flaubert
Our ignorance of history makes us vilify our own age. -- Gustave Flaubert
Iced champagne was served, and the feel of the cold wine in her mouth gave Emma a shiver that ran over her from head to toe. -- Gustave Flaubert
COLD. Healthier than heat. -- Gustave Flaubert
An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space. -- Gustave Flaubert
Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. -- Gustave Flaubert
Talent is nothing but long patience. -- Gustave Flaubert
Coffee: Induces wit. Good only if it comes through Havre. After a big dinner party it is taken standing up. Take it without sugar - very swank: gives the impression you have lived in the East. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love wearied her more than great debauchery. -- Gustave Flaubert
servant, the grand duet in D major, all were for -- Gustave Flaubert
DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.) -- Gustave Flaubert
The man is nothing, the work
all. -- Gustave Flaubert
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry. -- Gustave Flaubert
You must - do you hear me, young man? - you must work more than you are doing! -- Gustave Flaubert
There was always an uncertain promise dangling in the future like a golden fruit hanging from some fantastic bough. -- Gustave Flaubert
She no longer existed. -- Gustave Flaubert
Her great desire, in fact, was to have something more solid, more tangible than love to rely upon. -- Gustave Flaubert
Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work. -- Gustave Flaubert
You should have a heart in order to feel other people's hearts. -- Gustave Flaubert
It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt. -- Gustave Flaubert
There is always after the death of anyone a kind of stupefaction; so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign ourselves to believe in it. -- Gustave Flaubert
He had that incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for social conventions, that seduces or exasperates them. -- Gustave Flaubert
Sometimes I think I'm liquefying like an old Camembert. -- Gustave Flaubert
How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis. -- Gustave Flaubert
It was the fault of destiny! -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation. -- Gustave Flaubert
I live absolutely like an oyster. -- Gustave Flaubert
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts. -- Gustave Flaubert
Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory. -- Gustave Flaubert
But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire. She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated. -- Gustave Flaubert
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. -- Gustave Flaubert
Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it. -- Gustave Flaubert
My soul has been haunted by something like those forgotten melodies that come back to us at twilight, during those slow hours in which memory, like a ghost among ruins, stalks our thoughts. -- Gustave Flaubert
One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form. -- Gustave Flaubert
By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream -- Gustave Flaubert
Write about daily life as you would write history. -- Gustave Flaubert
Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you. -- Gustave Flaubert
He still was not happy, she never had been. What caused this inadequacy in her life? Why did everything she leaned on instantaneously decay?.. -- Gustave Flaubert
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it -- Gustave Flaubert
Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature. -- Gustave Flaubert
Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands. -- Gustave Flaubert
With my burned hand, I write about the nature of fire. -- Gustave Flaubert
It is a wonderful thing, how no one will allow anyone to live as he likes. -- Gustave Flaubert
The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet. -- Gustave Flaubert
DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.' -- Gustave Flaubert
Do you not know that there are souls constantly tormented? -- Gustave Flaubert
Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance. -- Gustave Flaubert
Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her - the opportunity, the courage. -- Gustave Flaubert
Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying. -- Gustave Flaubert
Doubt ... is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness. -- Gustave Flaubert
It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols. -- Gustave Flaubert
Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart. -- Gustave Flaubert
I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none. -- Gustave Flaubert
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us. -- Gustave Flaubert
Farming
a vocation accursed of heaven, since one never saw a millionaire involved in it. -- 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
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
As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker. -- Gustave Flaubert
The head-master made a -- Gustave Flaubert
Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live. -- Gustave Flaubert
The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded. -- Gustave Flaubert
Antiquite . en tout ce qui s'y rapporte: Est poncif, embe tant! etc. Antiquity. And everything to do with it, cliche d and boring. -- Gustave Flaubert
I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests. -- Gustave Flaubert
It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts. -- Gustave Flaubert
What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it. -- Gustave Flaubert
Emigres: Earned their livelihood by giving guitar lessons and mixing salads. -- Gustave Flaubert
Why, like all men," she replied. Then added, repulsing him with a languid movement - "You are all evil! -- Gustave Flaubert
If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed! -- Gustave Flaubert
By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself. -- Gustave Flaubert
What is the beautiful, if not the impossible. -- Gustave Flaubert
No, read in order to live. -- Gustave Flaubert
The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft. -- Gustave Flaubert
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. -- Gustave Flaubert
Adultery ... could be as banal as marriage. -- 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
Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it. -- Gustave Flaubert
Speech is a rolling mill which always stretches out the feelings that go into it. -- Gustave Flaubert
The future is the worst thing about the present. -- Gustave Flaubert
Read in oreder to live -- Gustave Flaubert
There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me -- Gustave Flaubert
How badly arranged the world is. What is the purpose of ugliness, suffering, sadness? Why our powerless dreams? Why everything? -- Gustave Flaubert
What was it that thus set so far asunder the morning of the day before yesterday and the evening of to-day? -- Gustave Flaubert
