694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

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.

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.

It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.

I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports.... When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

COLD. Healthier than heat.