Gustave Flaubert Quotes - Page 4

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• One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Life, Thinking, Two

  Gustave Flaubert (1954). “The Selected Letters”

  14 Copy quote

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Beautiful, Moral

  Correspondence to Guy de Maupassant, October 26, 1880.

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Hands, Brain, Trying

  Gustave Flaubert, George Sand (2015). “The Correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert: Collected Letters of the Most Influential French Authors”, p.38, e-artnow

  13 Copy quote

• What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...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?

  Gustave Flaubert

  Book, Wind, Ideas

  27 Copy quote

• What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Book, Writing

  11 Copy quote

• The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!

  Gustave Flaubert

  Flower, Heart, Dust

  43 Copy quote

• 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

  Vanity, Literature, Conviction

  9 Copy quote

• The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Heart, Want, Stomach

  8 Copy quote

• [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

  Inspirational, Lying, Artist

  Gustave Flaubert, Francis Steegmuller (1980). “The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857”, p.189, Harvard University Press

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Rain, Fall, Heart

  Gustave Flaubert (2005). “November: Fragments in a Nondescript Style”, Hesperus Press

  64 Copy quote

• God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

  Gustave Flaubert

  World

  Gustave Flaubert (1991). “Early Writings”, p.34, U of Nebraska Press

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  Funny Life, Writing, Sound

  17 Copy quote

• My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Real, Writing, Backgrounds

  11 Copy quote

• We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep

  Gustave Flaubert

  Love, Girl, Dream

  Gustave Flaubert (2005). “November: Fragments in a Nondescript Style”, Hesperus Press

  27 Copy quote

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Doubt, Literature, Mania

  35 Copy quote

• One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Doubt, Desperate

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, People, Sensual

  Gustave Flaubert (1967). “Intimate notebook, 1840-1841”

  9 Copy quote

• Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Broken, Stupidity, Trying

  8 Copy quote

• Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Writing, Hair, Shining

  "Author, author: The Slow Language Movement" by Nick Laird, www.theguardian.com. July 3, 2009.

  16 Copy quote

• COLD. Healthier than heat.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Science, Heat, Cold

  Gustave Flaubert (1968). “Dictionary of Accepted Ideas”, p.25, New Directions Publishing

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Idols, Degrees, Sticks

  Gustave Flaubert, Geoffrey Wall (1992). “Madame Bovary: provincial lives”, Penguin USA

  9 Copy quote

• You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything

  Gustave Flaubert

  Heart, Criticism, Degrees

  Gustave Flaubert (2005). “November: Fragments in a Nondescript Style”, Hesperus Press

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Giving Up, Garden, Whales

  Gustave Flaubert (1957). “Madame Bovary”

  7 Copy quote

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Love, Good Sense

  Gustave Flaubert, Francis Steegmuller (1980). “The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857”, p.88, Harvard University Press

  5 Copy quote

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Stupid, Imagination, Morality

  Gustave Flaubert (1954). “The Selected Letters”

  6 Copy quote

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