The voices / 184 fragments

Gustave Flaubert

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Archive entries

01Undated

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

Gustave Flaubert / quote

02Undated

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 / quote

03Undated

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

Gustave Flaubert / quote

04Undated

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

Gustave Flaubert / quote

05Undated

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

Gustave Flaubert / quote

06Undated

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 / quote

07Undated

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.

Gustave Flaubert / quote

08Undated

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

Gustave Flaubert / quote

09Undated

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

Gustave Flaubert / quote

10Undated

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.

Gustave Flaubert / quote

11Undated

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

Gustave Flaubert / quote

12Undated

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

Gustave Flaubert / quote

13Undated

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.

Gustave Flaubert / quote

14Undated

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 / quote

15Undated

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

Gustave Flaubert / quote

16Undated

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

Gustave Flaubert / quote

17Undated

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

Gustave Flaubert / quote

18Undated

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

Gustave Flaubert / quote

19Undated

The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love.

Gustave Flaubert / quote

20Undated

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

Gustave Flaubert / quote

21Undated

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.

Gustave Flaubert / quote

22Undated

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.

Gustave Flaubert / quote

23Undated

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

Gustave Flaubert / quote

24Undated

Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.

Gustave Flaubert / quote