Quotes by "Gustave Flaubert"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.

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.

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker’s head if they’re not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it’s bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God’s face when it’s bitter

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.

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

As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.

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

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.

I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world

He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides

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