Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

— Gustave Flaubert

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

— Gustave Flaubert

We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep

— Gustave Flaubert

What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.

— Gustave Flaubert

What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright... Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?

— Gustave Flaubert

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

— Gustave Flaubert

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.

— Gustave Flaubert

When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say the way God sees events from above?

— Gustave Flaubert

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

— Gustave Flaubert

With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady’s album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.

— Gustave Flaubert