Gustave Flaubert Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• [T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Stars, Long, Soul

  Madame Bovary pt. 1, ch. 12 (1857) (translation by Francis Steegmuller)

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Stars, Poverty, Language

• I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Keys, Special, Literature

• Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Speech, Amplify, Rolling

  Gustave Flaubert (2010). “Madame Bovary: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.200, Penguin

• Le charme de la nouveaute , peu a' peu tombant comme un ve" t ement, laissait voir a' nu l'e ternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les me" mes formes et le me" me langage. The charm of novelty, falling little by little like a robe, revealed the eternal monotony of passion, which has always the same forms and the same language.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Fall, Passion, Littles

• What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Book, Writing

• The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Beautiful, Art, Thoughtful

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