Gustave Flaubert Quotes

“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.”

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

“Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.”

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

“Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.”

“for her, life was as cold as an attic with a window looking to the north, and ennui, like a spider, was silently spinning its shadowy web in every cranny of her heart.”

“The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.”

“The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”

“You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything”

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

“Everything measurable passes, everything that can be counted has an end. Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.”

“The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.”

“Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”

“Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.”

“And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.”

“Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.”

“For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.”

“Exuberance is better than taste”

“Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.”

“One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.”

“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”

“It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.”

“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”

“Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.”

“I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.”

“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”

“An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.”

“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

“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.”

“Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level”

“The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.”

“You don’t make art out of good intentions.”

“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.”

“There is no truth. There is only perception.”

“There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me”

“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.”

“I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.”

“You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.”

“I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”

“The public wants work which flatters its illusions.”

“He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.”

“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.”

“She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.”

“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.”

“Sadness is a vice.”

“He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.”

“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?”

“The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror”

“An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”

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

“The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.”

“Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.”

“By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream”

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

“Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?”

“And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.”

“Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom”

“The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.”

“Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?”

“Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.”

“Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.”