01UndatedYou forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
02UndatedThe one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
03UndatedLet 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.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
04UndatedAt other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waverGustave Flaubert / quote ↗
06UndatedThought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
07UndatedHow badly arranged the world is. What is the purpose of ugliness, suffering, sadness? Why our powerless dreams? Why everything?Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
08UndatedThe whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
09UndatedHe had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
10UndatedWe think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleepGustave Flaubert / quote ↗
11UndatedThe hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go to a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
12UndatedAn overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like. I want to know what they do, where they're from, their names, what they're thinking about at that moment, what they regret, what they hope for, their past loves, their current dreams ... and if they happen to be women (especially the young ones) then the urge becomes intense.How quickly would you want to see her naked, admit it, and naked through to her heart. How you try to learn where she comes from, where she's going, why she's here and not elsewhere!While letting your eyes wander all over her, you imagine love affairs for her, you ascribe her deep feelings. You think of the bedroom she must have, and a thousand things besides ... right down to the battered slippers into which she must slip her feet when she gets out of bed.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
13UndatedHe was savoring for the first time the ineffable subtleties of feminine refinement. Never had he encountered this grace of language, this quiet taste in dress, these relaxed, dove like postures. He marveled at the sublimity of her soul and at the lace on her petticoat. With her ever-changing moods, by turns brooding and gay, chattering and silent, fiery and casual, she aroused in him a thousand desires, awakening instincts or memories. She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague "she" of all the poetry books.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
14UndatedEveryone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common levelGustave Flaubert / quote ↗
15UndatedAs humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
16UndatedI am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
17UndatedIf there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answering that immoderate desire for the infinite and the vague that we call the soul, it is art.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
18UndatedIf you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
19UndatedThe morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
20Undated...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
21UndatedWhat better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
22UndatedAbstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
23UndatedFrom time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (1850)Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
24UndatedBe regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
