Gustave Flaubert

“triste comme une maison démeublée ;”

— Gustave Flaubert

“The man is nothing, the work--all.”

— Gustave Flaubert

“Sadness is a vice.”

— Gustave Flaubert

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

— Gustave Flaubert

To be simple is no small matter.

— Gustave Flaubert

You can't find the soul with a scalpel.

— Gustave Flaubert

COLD. Healthier than heat.

— Gustave Flaubert

Everything is there: the love of Art.

— Gustave Flaubert

Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.

— Gustave Flaubert

The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.

— Gustave Flaubert

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

— Gustave Flaubert

Everyone became brave from excess of terror.

— Gustave Flaubert

By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.

— Gustave Flaubert

We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!

— Gustave Flaubert

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

— Gustave Flaubert

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

— Gustave Flaubert

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

— Gustave Flaubert

“But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in…

— Gustave Flaubert

“Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting.”

— Gustave Flaubert

I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average…

— Gustave Flaubert

“There was always an uncertain promise dangling in the future like a golden fruit hanging from some fantastic bough.”

— Gustave Flaubert

One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.

— Gustave Flaubert

“His wife had been wild about him at first; she had treated him with an amorous servility that had turned him against…

— Gustave Flaubert

I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if…

— Gustave Flaubert

“If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy,…

— Gustave Flaubert

“Future joys are like tropical shores; like a fragrant breeze, they extend their innate softness to the immense inland world of past…

— Gustave Flaubert

“that incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the…

— Gustave Flaubert

Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting…

— Gustave Flaubert

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage:…

— Gustave Flaubert

“I lead a bitter life, devoid of all external joy and in which I have nothing to keep me going but a…

— Gustave Flaubert

“Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned…

— Gustave Flaubert

“...as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the…

— Gustave Flaubert

“She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she…

— Gustave Flaubert

“But the more Emma recognised her love, the more she crushed it down, that it might not be evident, that she might…

— Gustave Flaubert

In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the…

— Gustave Flaubert

“Ah!" thought Rodolphe, turning very pale, "that was what she came for." At last he said with a calm air— "Dear madame,…

— Gustave Flaubert

“The most exaggerated speeches usually hid the weakest of feelings - as though the fullness of the soul did not overflow into…

— Gustave Flaubert

“It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque,…

— Gustave Flaubert