quotes by Gustave Flaubert

"Read in order to live."
— Gustave Flaubert

"There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it"
— Gustave Flaubert

"Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living."
— Gustave Flaubert

"Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and 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.
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— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work."
— Gustave Flaubert

"Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work."
— Gustave Flaubert

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

"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work."
— Gustave Flaubert

"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."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be pwerful and original in your work.

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— Gustave Flaubert

"For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"We should never handle our idols, because the gilt will come off in our hands. "
— Gustave Flaubert

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

"Did not love, like Indian plants, need a special soil, a particular temperature? Sighs by moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over yielded hands, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness could not be separated from the balconies of great castles full of indolence, from boudoirs with silken curtains and thick carpets, well-filled flower stands, a bed on a raised dais, nor from the flashing of precious stones and the shoulder-knots of liveries."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"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?"
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"'We aren't there yet,' said Bouvard.
'Let's hope not,' said Pecuchet. "
— Gustave Flaubert

"I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!"
— Gustave Flaubert

"You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem 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. "
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
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— Gustave Flaubert