Gustave Flaubert quotes - page 6

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands. (Gustave Flaubert)
Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
He is so corrupt that he would willingly pay for the pleasure of selling himself. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
Axiom: hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom. But I include in the word bourgeois, the bourgeois in blouses as well the bourgeois in coats. It is we and we alone, that is to say the literary men, who are the people, or to say it better: the tradition of humanity. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
Without ideality, there is no grandeur; without grandeur there is no beauty. Olympus is a mountain. The most effective monument will always be the Pyramids. Exuberance is better than taste; the desert is better than a streetpavement, and a savage is surely better than a hairdresser! View quote
Gustave Flaubert
A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
Don't talk to me about your hideous reality! What does it mean - reality? (Gustave Flaubert)
What a horrible invention, the bourgeois, don't you think? View quote
Gustave Flaubert
There is no 'true. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
A thing derided is a thing dead a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
You 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. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
Success is a result, not a goal. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it. (Gustave Flaubert)
I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
My kingdom is as wide as the world, and my desire has no limit. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing worlds, without fear, without compassion, without love, and without God. Men call me Science. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
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. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
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. View quote
Gustave Flaubert