Best 382 quotes of Gustave Flaubert on MyQuotes

Gustave Flaubert

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

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    Gustave Flaubert

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

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    Gustave Flaubert

    After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.

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    Gustave Flaubert

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

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Ah! In fact there are two moralities ... The petty one, the conventional one, the one devised by men, that keeps changing and bellows so loudly, making a commotion down here among us, in a perfectly pedestrian way ... But the other one, the eternal one, is all around and above us, like a landscape that surrounds us and the blue sky that gives us light.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

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    Gustave Flaubert

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

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    Gustave Flaubert

    And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?

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    Gustave Flaubert

    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 aremetaphors.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    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.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Antiquite  . en tout ce qui s'y rapporte: Est poncif, embe"  tant! etc. Antiquity. And everything to do with it, cliche  d and boring.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.

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    Gustave Flaubert

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

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    Gustave Flaubert

    A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Beautiful things spoil nothing.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    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.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.

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    Gustave Flaubert

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

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    Gustave Flaubert

    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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    Gustave Flaubert

    Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    But an infinity of passions can be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a tiny space.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    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.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    COLD. Healthier than heat.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Coffee: Induces wit. Good only if it comes through Havre. After a big dinner party it is taken standing up. Take it without sugar - very swank: gives the impression you have lived in the East.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'

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    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?

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea--of an ideal.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.

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    Gustave Flaubert

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

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Emma was no asleep, she was pretending to be asleep; and, while he was dozing off at her side, she lay awake, dreaming other dreams.

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    Gustave Flaubert

    Everyone became brave from excess of terror.