Gustave Flaubert Quotes - Page 8

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.

Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?

Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

Snicker on hearing his name: 'the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.'

And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.

[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.

I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world

Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.