Gustave Flaubert Quotes

“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.”

Correspondence, Letters to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie
Variant: Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.
Context: Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live. (June 1857)

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

Source: Madame Bovary

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

“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.”

Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d'être violent et original dans vos œuvres. To Gertrude Tennant (December 25, 1876)
Correspondence
Variant: Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

“Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.”

“Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.”

Gustave Flaubert Quotes about life

“for her, life was as cold as an attic with a window looking to the north, and ennui, like a spider, was silently spinning its shadowy web in every cranny of her heart.”

Source: Madame Bovary

“The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.”

Source: Madame Bovary

“Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.”

“She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.”

Source: Madame Bovary

“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.”

Source: Madame Bovary

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

Source: Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert Quotes about love

“What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.”

Source: Madame Bovary

“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.”

Source: Madame Bovary

“You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything”

Source: Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert book November

Source: November

“Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue.”

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

Gustave Flaubert: Trending quotes

“Everything measurable passes, everything that can be counted has an end. Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.”

Source: Madame Bovary

“The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.”

Source: The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830-1857

“Don't talk to me about your hideous reality! What does it mean — reality?”

18 March 1857
Correspondence, Letters to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie

Gustave Flaubert Quotes

“Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”

Pt. 1, Ch. 4
Sentimental Education (1869)
Context: Don't talk to me about your hideous reality! What does it mean — reality? Some see things black, others blue — the multitude sees them brute-fashion. There is nothing less natural than Michael Angelo; there is nothing more powerful! The anxiety about eternal truth is a mark of contemporary baseness; and art will become, if things go on in that way, a sort of poor joke as much below religion as it is below poetry, and as much below politics as it is below business. You will never reach its end — yes, its end! — which is to cause within us an impersonal exaltation, with petty works, in spite of all your finished execution.

“Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.”

“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.”

“Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.”

Source: Madame Bovary

“For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.”

14 August 1853
Correspondence, Letters to Madame Louise Colet

“Exuberance is better than taste”

Pt. 2, Ch. 3
Sentimental Education (1869)
Context: For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act. They are hampered by mistrust of themselves, daunted by the fear of giving offence; besides, deep feelings of affection are like respectable women; they are afraid of being found out and they go through life with downcast eyes.

“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.”

Pt. 1, Ch. 4; the most famous portion of this statement is "Exuberance is better than taste…" [Mieux vaut l'exubérance que le goût.]
Sentimental Education (1869)
Context: Without ideality, there is no grandeur; without grandeur there is no beauty. Olympus is a mountain. The most effective monument will always be the Pyramids. Exuberance is better than taste; the desert is better than a streetpavement, and a savage is surely better than a hairdresser!

“One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.”

“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”

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

Source: Madame Bovary

“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”

Source: Sentimental Education

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

Source: Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert Memoirs of a Madman

Source: Memoirs of a Madman

“I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.”

“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”

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

“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

Source: Madame Bovary

“It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.”

13 August 1846
Correspondence, Letters to Madame Louise Colet

“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”

Source: Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

Gustave Flaubert book November

Source: November

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

“You don’t make art out of good intentions.”

“One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.”

“There is no truth. There is only perception.”

Source: Madame Bovary

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

Quoted in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1857-1880, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), xii.
Correspondence
Variant: There is no 'true'. There are merely ways of perceiving truth.

“Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.”

“I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.”

Source: Madame Bovary

“You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.”