Quotes from Gustave Flaubert

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.

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

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

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.

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

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers." (Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)

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

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

What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

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

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

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

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

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.

Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul's possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal 'what's the use?' – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.

You don't make art out of good intentions.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

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