It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
— Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist, considered the leading exponent of literary realism both in France and abroad. He is known especially for his debut novel, Madame Bovary, published in 1857, for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to style and aesthetics.
The celebrated writer Guy de Maupassant was his protégé. Alongside Madame Bovary, the other works of his that are most quoted in our library include Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, November, Bouvard and Pecuchet and Sentimental Education.
The celebrated writer Guy de Maupassant was his protégé. Alongside Madame Bovary, the other works of his that are most quoted in our library include Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, November, Bouvard and Pecuchet and Sentimental Education.
Most quoted works
- Madame Bovary 48
- Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour 11
- November 9
- Bouvard and Pecuchet 6
- Sentimental Education 5
- Memoirs of a Madman 4
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.
— Madame Bovary
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
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
What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!
— Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.
— Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
— November
Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
— Memoirs of a Madman
An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
— Madame Bovary
Let 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.
— Madame Bovary
How badly arranged the world is. What is the purpose of ugliness, suffering, sadness? Why our powerless dreams? Why everything?
— Correspondance
He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.
— Madame Bovary
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.
— November
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.
— Madame Bovary
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
— Madame Bovary
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.
— Madame Bovary
On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
— Bouvard and Pecuchet
Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.
— Madame Bovary
He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.
— November
But vilifying those we love always detaches us from them a little. We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
— Madame Bovary
Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.
— The Letters, 1830-1880
I have patience in all things – as far as the antechamber.
— Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.
— Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ‘the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding 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.
— Madame Bovary