Top 304 Quotes & Sayings by Gustave Flaubert - Page 3

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.

Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

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

The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.

What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level

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.

Beautiful things spoil nothing.

I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world.

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

The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.

I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!

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.

What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures.

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

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.

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

Snicker on hearing his name: 'the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.'

She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.

Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.

Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible.

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.

The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror

My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.

Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.

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

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter

The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded.

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.

Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.

There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.

Everyone became brave from excess of terror.

It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.

For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

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

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

[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.

Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!

How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.

Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.

Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.

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

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.