Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Gustave Flaubert

French Writer, Western Novelist known for his first novel, Madame Bovary

"In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ?I don?t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don?t see what use he is."

"Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex..."

"Irony takes nothing away from pathos."

"In the tragedy in question, for example, he condemned the ideas but admired the style, abhorred the conception but praised all the details, found the characters impossible but their speeches marvelous"

"It is a delicious thing to write, whether well or badly - to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating."

"It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes."

"Isn?t ?not to be bored? one of the principal goals of life?"

"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."

"Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men."

"It is always a good thing to have a handle to your name: and, without more ado, give up your Catholic and Satanic poets, whose philosophy is as old as the twelfth century! Your despair is silly. The very greatest men have had more difficult beginnings..."

"It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols."

"It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts."

"It seemed to her that certain parts of the world must produce happiness as they produced peculiar plants which will flourish nowhere else."

"It is the fault of fate."

"It was all her fortune. It seemed to her very fine thus to throw it away."

"It seemed to her that certain portions of the earth must produce happiness -- as thought it were a plant native only to those soils and doomed to languish elsewhere. Why couldn't she be leaning over the balcony of some Swiss chalet? Or nursing her melancholy in a cottage in Scotland, with a husband clad in a long black velvet coat and wearing soft leather shoes, a high-crowned hat and fancy cuffs?"

"It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs."

"It was a bridal bouquet, his first wife's bouquet. Her eyes fell on it. Charles saw her looking at it, and took it up into the attic. Sitting back in an arm-chair, while her things were being unpacked, Emma's thoughts strayed to her own wedding bouquet, which was stowed away in a bandbox, and she wondered, in a vague sort of way, what would happen to it, if by chance she came to die."

"It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don?t get horny enough to actually to father them."

"It was an irresistible and conclusive argument."

"It was for him that she had done it -- for this creature here, this man who understood nothing, who felt nothing."

"It was the fault of destiny!"

"It was something like an initiation into the social world, a taste of forbidden fruit. And as he put his hand on the door-knob to go in, he experienced an almost voluptuous pleasure. And thus many things which had been repressed within him began to expand and blossom forth. He learnt by heart some popular songs, with which he would greet his boon companions, went mad over Beranger, acquired the secret of making punch, and at length became acquainted with the mysteries of Love."

"It wasn't the first time in their lives that they had seen trees, blue sky and lawn, or heard the flowing of water or the rustle of the breeze in the branches, but never before, certainly, had they looked on it all with such wonder: it was as though nature had not existed before, or had only begun to be beautiful with the slaking of their desires."

"It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, It's delicious! Rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn?t be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead"

"It's splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts."

"It's no good fighting against Fate or trying to resist the smile of the angels. Who can help being swept off his feet by all that is beautiful, charming, adorable?"

"It?s no easy business to be simple."

"It?s hard to communicate anything exactly and that?s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find."

"Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force."

"Julian's father and mother lived in a castle with a forest round it, on the slope of a hill."

"L‚on was tired of loving without having anything to show for it, and he was beginning to feel the depression that comes from leading a monotonous life without any guiding interest or buoyant hope."

"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."

"Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity."

"Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue."

"Love, she felt, ought to come all at once, with great thunderclaps and flashes of lightning; it was like a storm bursting upon life from the sky, uprooting it, overwhelming the will, and sweeping the heart into the abyss. It did not occur to her that rain forms puddles on a flat roof when the drainpipes are clogged, and she would have continued to feel secure if she had not suddenly discovered a crack in the wall."

"Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings."

"Love for every heart."

"Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionizes it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss."

"Many things would be explained if we could know our real genealogy. For, since the elements which make a man are limited, should not the same combinations reproduce themselves? Thus heredity is a just principle which has been badly applied."

"Matters of deeper import seemed to seek utterance in the expression of their eyes. They tried to speak of ordinary, everyday things, but all the while they felt a mutual languor stealing into their inmost being. It was like a murmur of the soul, deep down, persistent, dominating the spoken word. Lost in wonder at the strange sweetness that stole upon their senses, they never spoke of it to one another or sought to probe its cause. Coming delights, like the shores of tropic isles, exhale across the spreading seas their perfume-laden airs, the native softness of the clime; and they who breathe them, their spirits lulled as if by wine, scan not, nor try to scan, the faint, far-off horizon."

"Madame Bovary is myself."

"Love, to her, was something that comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings."

"Love... must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning -- a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart off with it into the abyss."

"Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar."

"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."

"My God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, of B‚ranger! My credo is the credo of Rousseau! I adhere to the immortal principles of '89! I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later! Those things aren't only absurd in and of themselves, Madame -- they're completely opposed to all physical laws!"

"Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom"

"My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real."

"My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing worlds, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called Science."