Gustave Flaubert famous quotes

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.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Inspirational #Men #Rumor

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.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Congratulations #Blessing #Accomplishment

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Nature #Believe #Sky

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Inspirational #Life #Children

Read in order to live.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Book #Reading #Order

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

#Inspirational #Travel #Adventure

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Inspirational #Life #Poetry

Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Doubt #Madness #Illness

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.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Beautiful #Cherish #Accepting

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

#Book #Ideas #Wind

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Inspirational #Life #Art

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.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Rain #Fall #Heart

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

#Dance #Stars #Long

An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Passion #Space #Crowds

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Love #Ruins #Literature

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Dream #Freedom #Stupid

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Book #Literature #Way

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Long #Interesting #Looks

Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Writing #Giving #Wish

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Tired #Adultery #Emma

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Success #Congratulations #Goal

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

#Keys #Special #Language

I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Love #Art #Children

Everything is there: the love of Art.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Art #Artist

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Real #Writing #Backgrounds

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Stars #Poverty #Language

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Strong #Ideas #Heavy

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Art #Ordinary #World

There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Art #Views #Style

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Want #Illusion

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Birthday #Age #Today

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Heart #Criticism #Degrees

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Beautiful #Writing #Creating

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?
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Ocean #Moving #Sight

You don’t make art out of good intentions.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Art #Good Intentions #Intention

I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Brother #Horse #Angel

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Writing #Sea #Wade

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Dream #Trying

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Art #Giving #Imagine

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.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Idols #Degrees #Sticks

I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Strong #Art #Wall

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Hair #Floating #Soup

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.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Travel #Voyages #Return

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.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Character #Heart #Plot

(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Egypt #Dust #Gleam

The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Art #Pride #Giving

Talent is long patience.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Writing #Long #Talent

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#I Hate You #Doe #Masters

Coffee: Induces wit. Good only if it comes through Havre. After a big dinner party it is taken standing up. Take it without sugar - very swank: gives the impression you have lived in the East.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Taken #Party #Coffee

Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Goal #Results

My God, this novel makes me break out in a cold sweat! Do you know how much I've written in five months, since the end of August? Sixty-five pages! Each paragraph is good in itself and there are some pages that are perfect. I feel certain. But just because of this, it isn't getting on. It's a series of well-turned, ordered paragraphs which do not flow on from each other. I shall have to unscrew them, loosen the joints, as one does with the masts of a ship when one wants the sail to take more wind...
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Sweat #August #Wind

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Inspirational #Humility #Stupidity

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

#Ignorance #History #Literature

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Book #Believe #Judging

A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Missing You #Beautiful #Memories

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Dog #Writing #Literature

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Art #Politeness

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Poetry #Literature #May

What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Sticks #Serious #Gestures

[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

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Travel #Tired #Literature

The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Flower #Heart #Dust

•"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.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Heart #Spinning #Spiders

Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Stars #Unrequited Love #Memorable

You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Art #Men #Numbers

She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Paris #Wanted To Die #Wanted

Exuberance is better than taste.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Enthusiasm #Taste #Exuberance

For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Universe

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Men #Frying Pans #Chestnuts

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Book #Play #Heroines

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Writing #Hair #Shining

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Return

I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Depression #Dream #Ambition

I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Sweet #Wine #Men

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Dying #Constant

The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Soul #World #This World

And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Moon #Light #Ice

I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Morning #Afternoon

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Laughter #Men #Laughing

… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Heart #Lines #Empty

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.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Father #Son #Aggravation

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.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Sea #Storm #Ruins

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Sweet #Book #Character

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

#Mean #Thinking #Laughing

He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Dream #Funeral

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Memories #Firsts #Anticipation

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

#Life #Looks #Charm

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

#Stupid #Selfish #Intellectual

One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Doubt #Desperate

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
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Soul #Identity #Gains

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Art #Believe #Feelings

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Aggravation #Humanity #Literature

The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Philosophy #Design #Humanity

There is no truth. There is only perception.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Truth #Perspective #Perception

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.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Powerful #Artist #Literature

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Stupid #Literature #Unshakable

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Art #Lying #Art Is

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Inspirational #Life #Work

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.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Writing #Sound #Ears

Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.
-- Gustave Flaubert

#Children #Giving #Morality