Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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

“I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”

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

“People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.”

“...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.”

“Its hard to communicate anything exactly and thats why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.”

“Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom”

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

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

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

“At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn li...”

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

“We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity I think thats what being really human means.”

“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.”

“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.”

“She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.”

“Before marriage she thought hserself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one m...”

“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...”

“Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.”

“Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting.”