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Gustave Flaubert QUOTES

1 " It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find. "

― Gustave Flaubert , Sentimental Education

2 " Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live. "

― Gustave Flaubert

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

― Gustave Flaubert

4 " There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it "

― Gustave Flaubert

5 " One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels. "

― Gustave Flaubert

6 " We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means. "

― Gustave Flaubert

7 " 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. "

― Gustave Flaubert , Madame Bovary

8 " God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world "

― Gustave Flaubert

9 " 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 "

― Gustave Flaubert

10 " In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is. "

― Gustave Flaubert , Bouvard and Pecuchet

Gustave Flaubert QUOTES

11 " Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom "

― Gustave Flaubert , November

12 " 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 , Madame Bovary

13 " 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 , Madame Bovary

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

― Gustave Flaubert

15 " I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world "

― Gustave Flaubert

16 " He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides "

― Gustave Flaubert

17 " I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room "

― Gustave Flaubert

18 " 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 , Madame Bovary

19 " What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds! "

― Gustave Flaubert , Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

20 " When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow. "

― Gustave Flaubert , Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour