Gustave Flaubert Quotes - Page 10

Adultery ... could be as banal as marriage.

I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.

Je suis autant Chinois que Fran c° ais. I am as much Chinese as French.

The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.

… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!

I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.

My God, this novel makes me break out in a cold sweat! Do you know how much I've written in five months, since the end of August? Sixty-five pages! Each paragraph is good in itself and there are some pages that are perfect. I feel certain. But just because of this, it isn't getting on. It's a series of well-turned, ordered paragraphs which do not flow on from each other. I shall have to unscrew them, loosen the joints, as one does with the masts of a ship when one wants the sail to take more wind.

You can't find the soul with a scalpel.

L'Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.

In her enthusiasms she had always looked for something tangible: she had always loved church for its flowers, music for its romantic words, literature for its power to stir the passions and she rebelled before the mysteries of faith just as she grew ever more restive under discipline, which was antipathetic to her nature.

She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.

Madame Bovary is myself.

Tout ce qu'on invente est vrai, soi-en sure. La poesie est une chose aussi precise que la geometrie.

Ah! In fact there are two moralities ... The petty one, the conventional one, the one devised by men, that keeps changing and bellows so loudly, making a commotion down here among us, in a perfectly pedestrian way ... But the other one, the eternal one, is all around and above us, like a landscape that surrounds us and the blue sky that gives us light.

It seems to me... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.

They took each other's advice, opened one book, went over to another, then did not know what to decide when opinions diverged so widely.

For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.

If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed!

Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.

Art is nothing without form.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

Reveal art; conceal the artist.

I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.

Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.

I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.