Gustave Flaubert Quotes - Page 7

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter

Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.

Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.

You'll always have to deal with bastards, being lied to, deceived, slandered and ridiculed, but that's to be expected and you must thank heaven when you meet the exception.

The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded.

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.

How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.

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

We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

But an infinity of passions can be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a tiny space.

Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.

(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.

A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.

Casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands.

He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.

I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.

Talent is long patience.