Gustave Flaubert Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no truth. There is only perception.

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.

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

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

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

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

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

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

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!

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

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

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.

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.

Exuberance is better than taste.

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

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

I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.

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.

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.

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

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