Gustave Flaubert quote: "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."

You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of a...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The author should be in his work like God is in the universe--present everywhere and visible nowhere...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Everything measurable passes, everything that can be counted has an end. Only three things are infin...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crus...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Charles's conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone's ideas filed along it in their ordin...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without getting a spark, incapable, more...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, r...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

One mustn
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when h...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

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

Read in order to live.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

There is no truth. There is only perception.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the b...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of t...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attra...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instructio...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidit...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

...exaggerated turns of speech conceal mediocre affections: as if the fulness of the soul might not ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

A child of my own! Oh, no, no, no! Let my flesh perish with me, and let me not transmit to anyone th...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Exuberance is better than taste.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that wha...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

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

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

What is beautiful is moral; that is all there is to it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Happy are they who don't doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page. I myself hesitate, I f...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

By dint of railing at idiots you run the risk of becoming idiotic yourself
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

You must not think that feeling is everything. . . . Art is nothing without form.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Exuberance is better than taste
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Books are made not like children but like pyramids and they're just as useless! And they stay in the...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

. . . human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance wh...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. . . I believe the greate...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The artist ought no more to appear in his work than God in nature.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed at
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when h...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Success is a result, not a goal
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first c...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I a...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Madame Bovary is myself.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanatic...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

To be simple is no small matter.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people ar...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

Había un no sé qué de vertiginoso que Emma sentía llegar hasta sí, como una emanación de aquel...
FLAUBERT GUSTAVE

Before a Parisienne in lace, in the salon of some illustrious physician, a person of importance with...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Well," he said, "don't you know that there are souls forever in torment? They must have alternate dr...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us he...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness whic...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who c...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of th...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identic...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passio...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ou...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all th...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure i...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corri...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life--this instantaneous tu...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she c...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she ke...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skie...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem t...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailo...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so th...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

A los ídolos es mejor no tocarlos porque algo de la pintura dorada que los recubría se nos queda s...
FLAUBERT GUSTAVE

Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opin...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom ...
FLAUBERT GUSTAVE

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

How badly arranged the world is. What is the purpose of ugliness, suffering, sadness? Why our powerl...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from und...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the b...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

She (Madame Bovary) had that indefinable beauty that comes from happiness, enthusiasm, success - a b...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

You don’t make art out of good intentions.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest c...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhab...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Sadness is a vice.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s poss...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one in...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling and havoc wreaking
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Art, like the Jewish God, wallows in sacrifices. So tear yourself to pieces, mortify your flesh, rol...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

My soul has been haunted by something like those forgotten melodies that come back to us at twilight...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she w...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

When we entered a classroom we always tossed our caps on the floor, to free our hands; as soon as we...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Da bambino amavo ciò che si vede, da adolescente quello che si sente: da uomo, non amo più nulla.<...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

So when will this society, bastardised by every debauchery of mind, body and
soul, finally come...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Open them, weak yet proud man, pitiful ant that struggles to crawl over its
speck of dust! You ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Everyone rushes wherever his instincts impel him, the populace swarms like insects over a corpse, po...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

This haze of blood must subside, the palace must collapse under the weight of the riches it conceals...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

But for the man who watches the leaves trembling in the wind’s breath, the rivers meandering throu...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

Charles went to kiss her shoulder.
-Leave me alone! she said, you're creasing my dress.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

– Assim, nós – dizia ele –, por que nós nos conhecemos? Que acaso o quis? É que através da...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a f...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

...and since, human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears ...
FLAUBERT GUSTAVE

How oft the warmth of the sun above
Makes a pretty young girl dream of love.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Irony takes nothing away from pathos.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

But the more Emma recognised her love, the more she crushed it down, that it might not be evident, t...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed ...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Oh, if somewhere there were a being strong and handsome, a valiant heart, passionate and sensitive a...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

But how nothingness invades us! We are scarcely born ere decay begins for us, in such a way that the...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

There was an air of indifference about them, a calm produced by the gratification of every passion;...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like s...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

With my burned hand, I write about the nature of fire.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-ba...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country, that...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

..She still was not happy, she never had been. What caused this inadequacy in her life? Why did ever...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

... sentimentele slăbesc cînd le schimbi locul.../ Frédéric s’était attendu à des spa...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Print: to see one's name in print! - Some people commit a crime for no other reason
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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

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

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.
GUSTAV FLAUBERT

Read the sacred writings of all the peoples on Earth. Through all of them runs, like a red thread, t...
GUSTAVE MEYRINK

I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract.
GUSTAVE MOREAU

I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom; I am one who is fond of olden times and intense ...
GUSTAVE COURBET

No one could have less faith in the absolute and definitive importance of the work created by man, b...
GUSTAVE MOREAU

The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it i...
GUSTAVE COURBET

Fine art is knowledge made visible.
GUSTAVE COURBET

Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and exist...
GUSTAVE COURBET

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.
GUSTAVE COURBET

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.

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Gustave Flaubert

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.

Gustave Flaubert

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