Gustave Flaubert Quotes - Page 11

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• 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

  Memories, Past, Personality

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Advice, Opinion

  Gustave Flaubert (1976). “Bouvard and Pécuchet”, Penguin Books

  7 Copy quote

• If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed!

  Gustave Flaubert

  Dream, Ifs

  Gustave Flaubert (1957). “Madame Bovary”

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Kids, Special, Wish

  4 Copy quote

• She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Believe, Doubt, Different

  4 Copy quote

• Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Love, Flower, Hands

  11 Copy quote

• Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Speech, Amplify, Rolling

  Gustave Flaubert (2010). “Madame Bovary: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.200, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe" le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech 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

  Stars, Moving, Speech

  4 Copy quote

• The morality of art is in its very beauty.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Philosophy, History

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Reading, Writing

  4 Copy quote

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Self, Fame, Interest

  4 Copy quote

• Art is nothing without form.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Form, Art Is

  Letter to Madame Louise Colet, August 12, 1846.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Character, Comforting, Noble

  Gustave Flaubert (2013). “Madame Bovary”, p.114, Vintage

  11 Copy quote

• Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Stupid, Ignorance, Names

  55 Copy quote

• Reveal art; conceal the artist.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Artist, Revelations

  5 Copy quote

• I live absolutely like an oyster.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Oysters

  Gustave Flaubert, George Sand (2015). “The Correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert: Collected Letters of the Most Influential French Authors”, p.81, e-artnow

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Love, Art, Children

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Work, Heart, Night

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Baby, Block, Book

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Etc, Boring, Cliche

  5 Copy quote

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Hair, Scratches, Shirts

  8 Copy quote

• There was an air of indifference about them, a calm produced by the gratification of every passion; and through their manners were suave, one could sense beneath them that special brutality which comes from the habit of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit and tickle one’s vanity—the handling of blooded horses, the pursuit of loose women.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Horse, Passion, Vanity

  Gustave Flaubert (1993). “Madame Bovary: Patterns of Provincial Life”, Everyman's Library

  4 Copy quote

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Pain, Disappointment, Heart

  Gustave Flaubert, Mark Overstall (2004). “Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners”, p.57, OUP Oxford

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Sea, Two

  Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Sydney McDowall (2004). “Three Tales”, p.62, Courier Corporation

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Sacrifice, Order

  7 Copy quote

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