694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

However, all this reading had disturbed their brains.

She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins.

As there was no rational foundation for Frederick’s complaints, and as he could not give evidence of any real misfortune, Martinon was unable to understand his lamentations about existence. As for him, he went every morning to the school, after that took a walk in the Luxembourg, in the evening swallowed his half-cup of coffee; and with fifteen hundred francs a year, and the love of this work-woman, he felt perfectly happy.

It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides.

Human Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.

She devoutly put away in her drawers her beautiful dress, down to the satin shoes whose soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor. Her heart was like these. In its friction against wealth something had come over it that could not be effaced.

Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love wearied her more than great debauchery.

Leon at once envied the calm of the tomb, and one evening he had even made his will, asking to be buried in that beautiful rug with velvet stripes he had received from her. For this was how they would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now adapting their past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.