Home > Author > Gustave Flaubert
61 " I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them. "
― Gustave Flaubert
62 " If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answering that immoderate desire for the infinite and the vague that we call the soul, it is art. "
― Gustave Flaubert , Memoirs of a Madman
63 " If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim. "
64 " The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature. "
― Gustave Flaubert , Bouvard and Pecuchet
65 " ...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art. "
― Gustave Flaubert , Madame Bovary
66 " 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? "
67 " Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence. "
68 " From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (1850) "
69 " Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work. "
70 " I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony. "
― Gustave Flaubert , November
71 " People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along. "
72 " ...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver. "
73 " She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage. "
74 " Before marriage she thought hserself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books. "
75 " Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling. "
76 " Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting. "
77 " 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. "
78 " 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. "
79 " Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile. "
― Gustave Flaubert , The Correspondence of Gustave Flaubert George Sand: Flaubert - Sand
80 " 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. "