694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.

This was how they wished they had been: each was creating an ideal into which he was now fitting his past life.

Emma repeated to herself, “Good Heavens! Why did I marry?

The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don’t begrudge the giving of themselves.

Haven’t you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you’ve had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?

Accustomed to the calm aspects of things, she turned, instead, toward the more tumultuous. She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. She needed to derive from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immediate gratification of her heart, – being by temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions and not landscapes.

Poor human weakness! With your words, your languages, your sounds, you speak and stammer – you define God, the heaven and the earth, chemistry and philosophy, and you cannot express, with your language, all the joy that you derive from a naked woman – or a plum pudding.

Then a faintness came over her; she recalled the Viscount who had waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this air an odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes the better to breathe it in. But.

I call on your pride. Remember what you’ve done, what you dream of doing, and rise up. Great Heavens, consider yourself with more respect!