Gustave Flaubert Quotes - Page 2

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them.

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.

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

Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.

He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.

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

Comme l'on serait savant si l'on connaissait bien seulement cinq à six livres. ( How wise one might be if one knew thoroughly only some half of a dozen books

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

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

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

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.

But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.

As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.

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

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

As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.

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

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