694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

How wonderful to find in living creatures the same substance as those which make up minerals. Nevertheless they felt a sort of humiliation at the idea that their persons contained phosphorous like matches, albumen like white of egg, hydrogen gas like street lamps.

…je ne serai jamais qu'un écrivailleur honni, un vaniteux misérable. // l shall never be anything but a despised scribbler, a poor conceited fool.

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

Aquela putain, Emma Bovary, tem a vida eterna e eu morro como um cão.

I have patience in all things – as far as the antechamber.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

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

To be simple is no small matter.

But she—her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.