Gustave Flaubert Quotes

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.

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.

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.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

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

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

I do not like to "interest" the public with myself.

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

He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides

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.

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

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.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

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

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

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

She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

… 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!

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.

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.

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

Read in order to live.

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

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

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

Remembering the ball became for Emma a daily occupation. Every time Wednesday came round, she told herself when she woke up: 'Ah! One week ago...two weeks ago...three weeks ago, I was there!' And, little by little, in her memory, the faces all blurred together; she forgot the tunes of the quadrilles; no longer could she so clearly picture the liveries and the rooms; some details disappeared, but the yearning remained.

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.

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.

There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.

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.

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.

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.

It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

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.'

He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.

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.

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

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

You don’t make art out of good intentions.