Gustave Flaubert Quotes

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

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.

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

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

I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports.... When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

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

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.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

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.

Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain?

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

In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on.

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.

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

Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

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

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.

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

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

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!

Read in order to live.

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

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

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.

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.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

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

I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.

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

All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.

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

There is no truth. There is only perception.

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

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?

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.

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

We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep

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.

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

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

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

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

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

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.