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

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

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

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

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

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

"Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory."
— Gustave Flaubert

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

"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"
— Gustave Flaubert (November)

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

"Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers."
— 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)

"What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures. "
— Gustave Flaubert

"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."
— Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour)

"One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels."
— Gustave Flaubert

"I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is."
— Gustave Flaubert

"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"
— Gustave Flaubert (November)

"Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon. She had no idea by what wind it would reach her, toward what shore it would bear her, or what kind of craft it would be – tiny boat or towering vessel, laden with heartbreaks or filled to the gunwhales with rapture. But every morning when she awoke she hoped that today would be the day; she listened for every sound, gave sudden starts, was surprised when nothing happened; and then, sadder with each succeeding sunset, she longed for tomorrow."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"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)

"You don’t make art out of good intentions."
— Gustave Flaubert

"What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!"
— Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour)

"...for now he was in one of those crises when the soul yields a blurred glimpse of all that it enfolds, like an ocean, tempest-torn, uncovering everything from the seaweed in the shallows to the sands of the abyss."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation."
— Gustave Flaubert

"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."
— Gustave Flaubert

"He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.
"
— Gustave Flaubert (November: Fragments in a Nondescript Style)

"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)

"The public wants work which flatters its illusions."
— Gustave Flaubert

"L'avenir nous tourmente, le passe nous retient, c'est pour ca que le present nous echappe."
— Gustave Flaubert

"As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back."
— Gustave Flaubert

"The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie."
— Gustave Flaubert

"But the denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find."
— Gustave Flaubert (Sentimental Education)

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."
— Gustave Flaubert

"We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep"
— Gustave Flaubert (November)

"You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything"
— Gustave Flaubert (November)

"Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art. "
— Gustave Flaubert

"There is no truth. There is only perception."
— Gustave Flaubert

"From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (1850)"
— Gustave Flaubert

"The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame."
— Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour)

"The world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. We’re lucky to be living now."
— Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour)

"Ah! Traveling makes one modest – you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world."
— Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour)

"Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it."
— Gustave Flaubert

"My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real."
— Gustave Flaubert

"Language is like 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."
— Gustave Flaubert

"But for the man who watches the leaves trembling in the wind’s breath, the rivers meandering through the meadows, life twisting and turning and swirling through things, men living, doing good and evil, the sea rolling its waves and the sky with its expanse of lights, and who asks himself why these leaves are there, why the water flows, why life itself is such a terrible torrent plunging towards the boundless ocean of death in which it will lose itself, why men walk about, labor like ants, why the tempest, why the sky so pure and the earth so foul – these questions lead to a darkness from which there is no way out."
— Gustave Flaubert (Memoirs of a Madman)

"Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness."
— Gustave Flaubert (Memoirs of a Madman)