20 Gustave Flaubert Quotes on Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert quotes on flaubert

5. The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.

9. Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.

14. The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

21. The sentimental songs she sang in music class were all about little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagoons, gondoliers -- mawkish compositions that allowed her to glimpse, through the silliness of the words and the indiscretions of the music, the alluring, phantasmagoric realm of genuine feeling.

29. Everything immediately surrounding her -- boring countryside, inane petty bourgeois, the mediocrity of daily life -- seemed to her the exception rather than the rule. She had been caught in it all by some accident: out beyond, there stretched as far as the eye could see the immense territory of rapture and passions. In her longing she made no difference between the pleasures of luxury and the joys of the heart, between elegant living and sensitive feeling. Didn't love, like Indian plants, require rich soils, special temperatures?

31. Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon. She had no idea by what wind it would reach her, toward what shore it would bear her, or what kind of craft it would be - tiny boat or towering vessel, laden with heartbreaks or filled to the gunwhales with rapture. But every morning when she awoke she hoped that today would be the day; she listened for every sound, gave sudden starts, was surprised when nothing happened; and then, sadder with each succeeding sunset, she longed for tomorrow.

32. So from now on the days were going to continue one after the other like this, always the same, innumerable, bringing nothing! . . . It was God's will. The future was a pitch-black tunnel, ending in a locked door. She gave up her music: why should she play? Who was there to listen? . . . She left her drawing books and her embroidery in a closet. What was the use of anything? What was the use?

40. What exasperated her was Charles's total unawareness of her ordeal. His conviction that he was making her happy she took as a stupid insult: such self-righteousness could only mean that he didn't appreciate her.

42. There was a silence. They looked at each other; and their thoughts clung together in their common anguish like two throbbing hearts.

48. Our duty is to feel what is great and love what is beautiful -- not to accept all the social conventions and the infamies they impose on us.

53. She repented her virtue of days past as though it had been a crime; and what virtue she had left now crumbled under the furious assault of her pride. Adultery was triumphant; and she reveled in the prospect of its sordid ironies. The thought of her lover made her reel with desire; heart and soul she flung herself into her longing, borne toward him on waves of new rapture; and Charles seemed to her as detached from her life, as irrevocably gone, as impossible and done for, as though he were a dying man, gasping his last before her eyes.

60. The difficulties he foresaw were so formidable that he quickly banished the disagreeable subject from his mind.

61. She was filled with wonderment at the discovery that there was a bliss greater than mere happiness -- a love different from and transcending all others -- a love without break and without end, a love that increased throughout eternity! . . . She conceived the idea of becoming a saint. She bought rosaries and festooned herself with holy medals; she wished she had an emerald-studded reliquary within reach at her bed's head, to kiss every night.

62. When she knelt at the gothic prie-dieu she addressed the Lord with the same ardent words she had formerly murmured to her lover in the ecstasies of adultery. It was her way of praying for faith; but heaven showered no joy upon her, and she would rise, her limbs aching, with a vague feeling that it was all a vast fraud.

64. A mad idea seized her: he was gazing at her now! She was sure of it! She long to rush into his arms and seek refuge in his strength as in the very incarnation of love; she longed to cry: 'Ravish me! Carry me off! Away from here! All my passion and all my dreams are yours -- yours alone!' The curtain fell.

73. She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague 'she' of all the poetry books.

75. Often, when they spoke of Paris, she would murmur: 'Ah! How happy we'd be, living there!' 'Aren't we happy here?' the young would softly ask, passing his hand over her hair.

96. The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

98. The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

99. The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.