Gustave Flaubert Quotes

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

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.

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.

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

Without ideality, there is no grandeur; without grandeur there is no beauty. Olympus is a mountain. The most effective monument will always be the Pyramids. Exuberance is better than taste; the desert is better than a streetpavement, and a savage is surely better than a hairdresser!

Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.

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

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. (14 June 1853)

The brazen arms were working more quickly. They paused no longer. Every time that a child was placed in them the priests of Moloch spread out their hands upon him to burden him with the crimes of the people, vociferating: "They are not men but oxen!" and the multitude round about repeated: "Oxen! oxen!" The devout exclaimed: "Lord! Eat!"

Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live. (June 1857)

Sadness is a vice.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that ‘black hole’ is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions — nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze.

With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. (9 December 1852)

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.