Gustave Flaubert Quotes

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

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

There is no truth. There is only perception.

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

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

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Exuberance is better than taste.

Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.

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

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

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

Read in order to live.

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.

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

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

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

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

Talent is nothing but long patience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be simple is no small matter.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

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

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.