Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

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

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

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

And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.

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

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.

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

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.

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

He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.

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

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.

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

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.