Quotes from Gustave Flaubert

Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker.

What an awful thing life is, isn't it? It's like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

Love, she felt, ought to come all at once, with great thunderclaps and flashes of lightning; it was like a storm bursting upon life from the sky, uprooting it, overwhelming the will, and sweeping the heart into the abyss. It did not occur to her that rain forms puddles on a flat roof when the drainpipes are clogged, and she would have continued to feel secure if she had not suddenly discovered a crack in the wall.

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

At last she sighed. But the most wretched thing — is it not? — is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.

Come, let's be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

Je ne suis pas plus moderne qu'ancien, pas plus Français que Chinois, et l'idée de la patrie c'est-à-dire l'obligation où l'on est de vivre sur un coin de terre marqué en rouge ou en bleu sur la carte et de détester les autres coins en vert ou en noir m'a paru toujours étroite, bornée et d'une stupidité féroce.

Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex...

In her enthusiasms she had always looked for something tangible: she had always loved church for its flowers, music for its romantic words, literature for its power to stir the passions and she rebelled before the mysteries of faith just as she grew ever more restive under discipline, which was antipathetic to her nature.

Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!

Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.

Ne lisez pas comme les enfants lisent, pour vous amuser, ni comme les ambitieux lisent, pour vous instruire. Non. Lisez pour vivre.

No era feliz, no lo había sido nunca. ¿De dónde venía, pues, aquella insuficiencia, de la vida, aquella instantánea podredumbre de las cosas en que se apoyaba?[...]. Cada sonrisa disimulaba un bostezo de aburrimiento, cada alegría una maldición, cada placer su propio asco, y los mejores besos no dejaban sobre los labios más que un delirio irrealizable de una voluptuosidad más alta.

Has it ever happened to you, Léon went on, to come across some vague idea of one's own in a book, some dim image that comes to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?

While there's life there's hope.

How oft the warmth of the sun above Makes a pretty young girl dream of love.

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

But vilifying those we love always detaches us from them a little. We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.

Oh, if somewhere there were a being strong and handsome, a valiant heart, passionate and sensitive at once, a poet's spirit in an angel's form, a lyre with strings of steel, sounding sweet-sad epithalamiums to the heavens, then why should she not find that being?

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!

The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of--I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters--I live and breathe them.

Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

But what was making her unhappy? Where was the extraordinary catastrophe that had wrecked her life?She raised her head and looked around, as though trying to find the cause of her suffering.