Gustave Flaubert

Novelist

1821-12-12 – 1880-05-08

Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist and a central figure in literary realism. Born in Rouen on 1821-12-12, he is best known for Madame Bovary and for his exacting prose style. He died at Croisset on 1880-05-08.

Books by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary
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L'Éducation sentimentale
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Salammbô
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Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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.
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Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.
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And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
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Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile.
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Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting.
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Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.
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Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
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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.
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Before marriage she thought hserself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.
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She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.
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...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.
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I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
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People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.
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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
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From 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)
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...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art.
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What 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?
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The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
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If 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.
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As 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.
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