Gustave Flaubert Quotes

“She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.”
― E. M. Forster

“As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“It seems that the people of Oran are like that friend of Flaubert who, on the point of death, casting a last glance at the irreplaceable earth, exclaimed: "Close the window, it's too beautiful.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.”
― Truman Capote, Conversations with Capote

“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Desiderava al tempo stesso morire e vivere a Parigi.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Ma che importanza aveva! Non era felice, non lo era mai stata. Da dove veniva, dunque, quella insufficienza di vita, quella istantanea marcescenza delle cose a cui si appoggiava?… Ma se da qualche parte esisteva un essere forte e bello, una natura valorosa, ricca al tempo stesso di slancio e di delicatezza, un cuore di poeta sotto sembianze d’angelo, lira dalle corde di bronzo che indirizzava al cielo epitalami elegiaci, perché mai lei, per un favore del caso, non avrebbe potuto incontrarlo? Che cosa impossibile! D’altronde, nulla valeva la pena di una ricerca: tutto era menzogna! Ogni sorriso nascondeva uno sbadiglio di noia, ogni gioia una maledizione, ogni piacere il disgusto, e i migliori baci non lasciavano sulle labbra che l’irrealizzabile desiderio di una voluttà più alta.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Dar cum sa vorbesti despre un rau care nu poate fi descris,care isi schimba infatisarea ca norii, care se involbureaza ca vantul?”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“He got carried away as he developed his idea: 'The aesthetic quality of towns is essential. If, as has been said, every landscape is a frame of mind, then it is even more true of a townscape. The way the inhabitants think and feel corresponds to the town they live in. An analogous phenomenon can be observed in certain women who, during their pregnancy, surround themselves with harmonious objects, calm statues, bright gardens, delicate curios, so that their child-to-be, under their influence, will be beautiful. In the same way one cannot imagine a genius coming from other than a magnificent town. Goethe was born in Frankfurt, a noble city where the Main flows between venerable palaces, between walls where the ancient heart of Germany lives on. Hoffmann explains Nuremberg - his soul performs acrobatics on the gables like a gnome on the decorated face of an old German clock. In France there is Rouen, with its rich accumulation of architectural monuments, its. cathedral like an oasis of stone, which produced Corneille and then Flaubert, two pure geniuses shaking hands across the centuries. There is no doubt about it, beautiful towns make beautiful souls.”
― Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges

“I’ve read all my life, and I read everything. I’ve been so influenced by so much that as soon as I mention one name I think, “Oh, but I cant’s say that without saying that.” I think there are certain obvious big guns, but I really hate to say any one, or six, or twenty. But you could very roughly say that the English novelists of the nineteenth century and the Russian novelists of the nineteenth century were formative. That’s where my love and admiration end emulation was when I started. But then I read all that other junk, too. And I did my college work in French and Italian literature. I never much liked the French novelists. I can tell you what I don’t like. I don’t much like “the great tradition,” the James-Conrad thing that I was supposed to like when I was in college. I’ve revolted against that fairly consciously. Flaubert I really consider a very bad model for fiction writer.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“De todas las borrascas que caen sobre el amor, ninguna lo enfría y lo desarraiga tanto como las peticiones de dinero”
― Gustave Flaubert

“لكم تمنت ان تفضي لأحد بهذه الخواطر جميعاً و لكن، كيف السبيل إلى الافصاح عن ذلك الصيق الذي يتعذر التعبير عنه و الذي تتبدل صوره كالسحاب ، و يعصف بنفسها كالرياح!”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“You ask me whether the Orient is up to what I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions - so excellently so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams."
Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour”
― Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

“In 1872, when he was over fifty, Gustave Flaubert recalled the heady atmosphere of his youth in Rouen during the July Monarchy:
"I don’t know what the dreams of today’s students are, but ours were superbly extravagant—last expansions of the romanticism reaching us and which, compressed by the provincial milieu, produced a strange effervescence in our brains . . . enthusiastic hearts longed for dramatic amours with gondolas, black masks, and highborn ladies fainting in postal carriages in the middle of Calabria.”
― Robert J. Bezucha, The Art of the July Monarchy: France, 1830 to 1848

“Every time Leon had to tell her everything that he had done since their last meeting. She asked him for some verses - some verses for herself, a "love poem" in honour of her. But he never succeeded in getting a rhyme for the second verse; and at last ended by copying for her a sonnet in a "Keepsake". This was less from vanity than from the one desire of pleasing her. He did not question her ideas; he accepted all her tastes; he was rather becoming her mistress than she his. She had tender words and kisses that thrilled his soul. Where could she have learned this corruption almost incorporeal in the strength of its profundity and dissimulation?”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Anna is not just a woman, not just a splendid specimen of womanhood, she is a woman with a full, compact, important moral nature: everything about her character is significant and striking, and this applied as well to her love. She cannot limit herself as another character in the book, Princess Betsy, does, to an undercover affair. Her truthful and passionate nature makes disguise and secrecy impossible. She is not Emma Bovary, a provincial dreamer, a wistful wench creeping along crumbling walls to the beds of interchangeable paramours. Anna gives Vronski her whole life, consents to a separation from her adored little son—despite the agony it costs her not to see the child and she goes to live with Vronski first abroad in Italy, and then on his country place in central Russia, though this "open" affair brands her an immoral woman in the eyes of her immoral circle. (In a way she may be said to have put into action Emma's dream of escaping with Rodolphe, but Emma would have experienced no wrench from parting with her child, and neither were there any moral complications in that little lady's case.) Finally Anna and Vronski return to city life. She scandalizes hypocritical society not so much with her love affair as with her open defiance of society's conventions.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature