Great Throughts Treasury

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

Related Quotes

Gustave Flaubert

I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

Will |

Gustave Flaubert

She was pale all over, white as a sheet. The skin was drawn tight over her nose. She had a vague look in the eyes. And because she discovered three grey hairs on her temples, she talked about being an old woman.

Will |

Gustave Flaubert

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.

Need |

Gustave Flaubert

Such killings were part of the natural order of things, an inevitable consequence of belonging to a royal household.

Woman |

Gustave Flaubert

If you participate in life, you don?t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubbornness in denying that maxim.

Enough | Tomorrow | Will |

Gustave Flaubert

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

Will |

Gustave Flaubert

One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.

Better | Fear | Relationship | Will | World |

Gustave Flaubert

She's gasping for love like a carp on a kitchen table gasping for water.

Will |

Gustave Flaubert

None of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.

Play |

Gustave Flaubert

My novel is the rock to which I cling and I know nothing of what is taking place in the world.

Need |

Gustave Flaubert

She was standing bolt upright. With big flaming eyes she looked down on him with a severe, almost terrible expression. Then tears came and made a mist in them, her shell-like eyelids drooped, she surrendered her hands.

Woman |

Gustave Flaubert

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.

Gustave Flaubert

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Will |

Gustave Flaubert

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.

Love | Safe |

Gustavo Gutiérrez

The primacy of faith was followed by the "primacy of charity." ... But paradoxically, at the same time this was also partially responsible for the fact that for some the relationship with God was obscured and became difficult to live out and understand. Today, due partly perhaps to such impasses, the perspective of a new primacy seems to be emerging - that of hope, which liberates history because of its openness to the God who is to come.

Position | Will |

Gustave Flaubert

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

Will |

Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra

I think it's a very important collaboration between the conductor and the orchestra - especially when the conductor is one more member of the orchestra in the way that you are leading, but also respecting, feeling and building the same way for all the players to understand the music.

Future |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

Sound | Will |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

How far the gentlemen of dark complexion will get with their independence, now that they have declared it, I don?t know. There are serious difficulties in their way. The vast majority of people of their race are but two or three inches removed from gorillas: it will be a sheer impossibility, for a long, long while, to interest them in anything above pork-chops and bootleg gin.

Heart | Will |

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.

Will |