I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTI spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTThe whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTThe writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTIt’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTStupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTStupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTMy foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTTravel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTI 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.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTReality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTRead in order to live.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTIt’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTWe 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 FLAUBERTHuman 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 FLAUBERTPleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTOne can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT