Quotes from Gustave Flaubert

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

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

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

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

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

As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.

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

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

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

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

Exuberance is better than taste.

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

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.

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.

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

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.

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

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.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

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.

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

Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.

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

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