Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.

The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fin

Speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.

[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.

Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that’s for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I’ll be bound – you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters?

Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?

But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart.

His eagerness had turned into a routine; he embraced her at the same time every day. It was a habit like any other, a favourite pudding after the monotony of dinner.

This haze of blood must subside, the palace must collapse under the weight of the riches it conceals, the orgy must finish and the time come to awaken.

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.

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

When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from above?

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

A friend who dies, its something of you who dies.