Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Thought is the greatest of pleasures — pleasure itself is only imagination — have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?

The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror

Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings, — a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.

"It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, "It's delicious!" rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn’t be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead"

He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

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.

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

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

One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier. (22 October 1846)

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!

He is so corrupt that he would willingly pay for the pleasure of selling himself.

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

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.