Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

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.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. (13 August 1846)

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

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.

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

"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?"

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

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

[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.

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

If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.

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.

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

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