"On spinach: I dislike it, and am happy to dislike it because if I liked it I would eat it, and I cannot stand it."
Read quote
6 likes
Quote collection
Gustave Flaubert quotes (page 10 of 15)
299 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order."
Read quote
6 likes
"Mediocrity cherishes rules; as for me, I hate them; I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom."
Read quote
6 likes
"Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart."
Read quote
5 likes
"The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel."
Read quote
5 likes
"The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror"
Read quote
5 likes
"What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!"
Read quote
5 likes
"Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar."
Read quote
5 likes
"Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling."
Read quote
5 likes
"There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me"
Read quote
5 likes
"Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art."
Read quote
5 likes
"Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible."
Read quote
5 likes
"My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid."
Read quote
5 likes
"Snicker on hearing his name: 'the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.'"
Read quote
5 likes
"She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books."
Read quote
5 likes
"It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling."
Read quote
5 likes
"Beautiful things spoil nothing."
Read quote
5 likes
"And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light."
Read quote
5 likes
"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."
Read quote
5 likes
"There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going."
Read quote
5 likes