Gustave flaubert quotes

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

Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.

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

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

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

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

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.

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.

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

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

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

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

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

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.

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

Talent is nothing but long patience.

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

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

I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world.

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

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

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

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

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

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

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

By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.

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

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?

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.

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.

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?

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

Beautiful things spoil nothing.

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.

Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.

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.

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

I have dreamed much and have done very little.

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.

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

Read in order to live.

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

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

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

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.

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.

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

There is no truth. There is only perception.

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

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

Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.

I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.

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

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.

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

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

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

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

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

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

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!

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

What is glory? It is to have a lot of nonsense talked about you.

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

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.

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

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.

Exuberance is better than taste.

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.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

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

One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror

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

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 more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

Talent is a long patience.

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

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

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 is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.

COLD. Healthier than heat.

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

You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

Mediocrity cherishes rules; as for me, I hate them; I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.

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

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

Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea--of an ideal.

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.

Everything is there: the love of 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.

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

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

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

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

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

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

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!

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

The future is the worst thing about the present.

After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.

Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible.

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

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.

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

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.

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

To be simple is no small matter.

I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!