Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” Quotes (34 Quotes)


    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.

    Love, to her, was something hat 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.

    Emma was no asleep, she was pretending to be asleep; and, while he was dozing off at her side, she lay awake, dreaming other dreams.




    One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

    Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.

    She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.

    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.

    She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification - for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.


    She remembered the summer evenings all full of sunshine. The colts neighed when any one passed by, and galloped, galloped. Under her window there was a beehive, and sometimes the bees wheeling round in the light struck against her window like rebounding balls of gold.

    He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.


    His wife had been wild about him at first; she had treated him with an amorous servility that had turned him against her all the more. Vivacious, effusive, and very loving in the early days, over the years she had, like a stale wine that turns to vinegar, grown ill-humoured, waspish, and nervy.


    How she listened, the first time, to the sonorous lamentations of romantic melancholia echoing out across heaven and earth! If her childhood had been spent in the dark back-room of a shop in some town, she would now perhaps have been kindled by the lyric surgings of nature which only normally reach us as through the interpretation of a writer.




    I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.

    The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of--I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters--I live and breathe them.

    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.

    The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love.

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


    After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.



    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.

    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.

    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.

    Az a kötelességünk, hogy ráérezzünk arra, ami magasrendu", imádjuk azt, ami szép, nem pedig hogy elfogadjunk minden társadalmi konvenciót azzal a sok gyalázatos dologgal együtt, amit ránk kényszerítenek.

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


    More Gustave Flaubert Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Art - Life - Love - Literature - Happiness - Speech - Success - Man - Stupidity - Beauty - Work & Career - Nature - Mind - Poetry - Science - God - Emotions - Sense & Perception - Education - View All Gustave Flaubert Quotations

    More Gustave Flaubert Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - Madame Bovary

    Related Authors


    Paulo Coelho - Leo Tolstoy - Robertson Davies - Miguel de Cervantes - Mario Puzo - Jack Higgins - Honore de Balzac - Emily Bronte - Anne Rice - Aldous Huxley


Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections