Gustave Flaubert Quotes: 32

• Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

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

• One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

• 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.

• Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

• Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.

• Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

• Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.

• There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it

• One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

• It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.

  Sentimental Education

• Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.

  Memoirs of a Madman

• I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

• 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.

• You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

  Madame Bovary

• To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

• 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

  November

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

• You don’t make art out of good intentions.

• There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me

• Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

• The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

• Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.

• 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.

  Madame Bovary

• 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.

• An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

• What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

  Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

• 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.

  Madame Bovary

• Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom

  November

• When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

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

• The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love.

  Madame Bovary