Gustave Flaubert Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. 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. Madame Bovary

2. It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find. Sentimental Education

3. Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom November

4. To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

5. An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space. Madame Bovary

6. At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow. Madame Bovary

7. Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words bliss, passion, and rapture - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books. Madame Bovary

8. But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

9. Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness. Memoirs of a Madman

10. It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find. Sentimental Education

11. Poor thing! She had loved him, after all. Madam Bovary

12. Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again. Bouvard and Pecuchet

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

14. Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless it is the same everywhere. There are businessmen, police up there; people trade, fight, dethrone their kings. Some shooting stars suddenly slid past, describing a course in the sky like the parabola of a monstrous rocket. ‘My Word,’ said Bouvard, ‘look at those worlds disappearing.’ Pecuchet replied: ‘If our world in its turn danced about, the citizens of the stars would be no more impressed than we are now. Ideas like that are rather humbling.’ ‘What is the point of it all?’ ‘Perhaps there isn’t a point.’ ‘Yet…’ and Pecuchet repeated the word two or three times, without finding anything more to say. Bouvard and Pecuchet

15. There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it

16. What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds! Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

17. When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow. Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour