Gustave Flaubert: Trending quotes

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Gustave Flaubert: 196 quotes11 likes

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

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

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

Gustave Flaubert book Sentimental Education

Source: Sentimental Education

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

Gustave Flaubert Memoirs of a Madman

Source: Memoirs of a Madman

“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 Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

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

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

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

Gustave Flaubert

13 August 1846
Correspondence, Letters to Madame Louise Colet

“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.”

Gustave Flaubert

Source: Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

“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”

Gustave Flaubert book November

Source: November

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

Gustave Flaubert

“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.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

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

Gustave Flaubert

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.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

“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 book November

Source: November

“The public wants work which flatters its illusions.”

Gustave Flaubert