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Gustave Flaubert Quotes | Quotes said by Gustave Flaubert

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #1

    [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 rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #2

    A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #3

    A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #4

    Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #5

    Adieu, mon cher vieux. Relis et rebûche ton conte. Laisse-le reposer et reprends-le, les livres ne se font pas comme les enfants, mais comme les pyramides, avec un dessin prémédité, et en apportant des grands blocs l´un par-dessus l´autre, à force de reins, de temps et de sueur, et ça ne sert à rien! et ça reste dans le désert! mais en le dominant prodigieusement. Les chacals pissent au bas et les bourgeois montent dessus, etc.; continue la comparaison.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #6

    Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can’t stiffen up enough to create them.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #7

    All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #8

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

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #9

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

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #10

    An overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like. I want to know what they do, where they're from, their names, what they're thinking about at that moment, what they regret, what they hope for, their past loves, their current dreams ... and if they happen to be women (especially the young ones) then the urge becomes intense.

    How quickly would you want to see her naked, admit it, and naked through to her heart. How you try to learn where she comes from, where she's going, why she's here and not elsewhere!

    While letting your eyes wander all over her, you imagine love affairs for her, you ascribe her deep feelings. You think of the bedroom she must have, and a thousand things besides ... right down to the battered slippers into which she must slip her feet when she gets out of bed.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #11

    And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #12

    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.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #13

    And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #14

    And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #15

    Aquela putain, Emma Bovary, tem a vida eterna e eu morro como um cão.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #16

    Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #17

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

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #18

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

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #19

    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 Quote #20

    As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #21

    As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #22

    At last she sighed.

    But the most wretched thing — is it not? — is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #23

    At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #24

    At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #25

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

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #26

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

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #27

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

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #28

    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.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #29

    Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expected to find it.

  • Gustave Flaubert Quote #30

    Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?

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