694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ’the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.

Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody’s wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.

What was it that thus set so far asunder the morning of the day before yesterday and the evening of to-day?

Cheer up,′ said the captain’s son. ‘Life is long, and we are young.

What’s improper about it?” retorted the clerk. “Everybody does it in Paris!” It was an irresistible and conclusive argument.

It was all her fortune. It seemed to her very fine thus to throw it away.

Occasionally there came gusts of winds, breezes from the sea rolling in one sweep over the whole plateau of the Caux country, which brought even to these fields a salt freshness. The rushes, close to the ground, whistled; the branches trembled in a swift rustling, while their summits, ceaselessly swaying, kept up a deep murmur.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything.

Read much, but not many books.