694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Speech is a rolling machine that always stretches the feelings it expresses.

One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.

Love, she believed, must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightening – a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart with it off into the abyss.

I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.

There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more.

Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.

I understand,” said the notary; “a man of science can’t be worried with the practical details of life.

I can’t admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.