Gustave Flaubert Quotes - Page 2

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.

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

It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

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.

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

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

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.

The future is the worst thing about the present.

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

Exuberance is better than taste.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Read in order to live.

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

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

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

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.

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.