694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

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

Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.

What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.