Gustave Flaubert Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

There is no truth. There is only perception.

Talent is nothing but long patience.

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

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!

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

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

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.

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.

To be simple is no small matter.

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

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

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

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

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

COLD. Healthier than heat.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

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.

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.

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

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.