Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

About Gustave Flaubert:

Gustave Flaubert is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

But vilifying those we love always detaches us from them a little. We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.

Gustave Flaubert

Has it ever happened to you," Léon went on, "to come across some vague idea of one's own in a book, some dim image that comes to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?

Gustave Flaubert

I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely oppo...

Gustave Flaubert

Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

Gustave Flaubert

Irony cleans away all those secret stains. Irony is the path that leads safely back to official realities.

Gustave Flaubert

Charles went to kiss her shoulder. -Leave me alone! she said, you're creasing my dress.

Gustave Flaubert

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

Gustave Flaubert

Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.

Gustave Flaubert

For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.

Gustave Flaubert

Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex...

Gustave Flaubert

Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting.

Gustave Flaubert

As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.

Gustave Flaubert

[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude ...

Gustave Flaubert

Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?

Gustave Flaubert

An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.

Gustave Flaubert

Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon. She had no idea by wha...

Gustave Flaubert

Pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall.

Gustave Flaubert

Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.

Gustave Flaubert

Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Gustave Flaubert

Without moving, you walk through lands you imagine you can see, and your thoughts, weaving in and out of the story, delight in the details or follow the outlines of the adventures. You merge with the character; you think you're the one whose heart is...

Gustave Flaubert

Author Bio

  • NameGustave Flaubert
  • Description1821-1880 French writer
  • BornDecember 12, 1821
  • DiedMay 8, 1880
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • Works