694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Sometimes I think I’m liquefying like an old Camembert.

All that has to do with life is repugnant to me; everything that draws me to it horrifies me. I should like never to have been born, or to die. I have within me, deep within me, a distaste which keeps me from enjoying anything and which fills my soul to the point of suffocating it. It reappears in relation to everything, like the bloated bodies of dogs which come back to the surface of the water despite the stones that have been tied to their necks to drown them.

There’s a fundamental stupidity in mankind which is as eternal as life itself.

How she listened, the first time, to the sonorous lamentations of romantic melancholia echoing out across heaven and earth! If her childhood had been spent in the dark back-room of a shop in some town, she would now perhaps have been kindled by the lyric surgings of nature which only normally reach us as through the interpretation of a writer.

If you knew all the dreams I’ve dreamed!

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

Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening – a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women.

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.