694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not experience as of believing anything that did not present itself in conventional forms she persuaded herself without difficulty that Charles’s passion was nothing very exorbitant.

One mustn’t always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

The head-master made a sign to us to sit down. Then, turning to the class-master, he said to him in a low voice –.

What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air – a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.

But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire. She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated.

I am the obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face.

You’ll always have to deal with bastards, being lied to, deceived, slandered and ridiculed, but that’s to be expected and you must thank heaven when you meet the exception.