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Quote by Gustave Flaubert

“It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.”

Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Author

Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert, born on December 12, 1821 and died on May 8, 1880, was a prominent French writer of the 19th century. Known for his exquisite literary skills and profound psychological portrayals, Flaubert is best remembered for his masterpiece 'Madame Bovary'. more

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“You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute, And now and then stab, as occasion serves.”

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“So I quit my job and went to the New England Culinary Institute for the full two years and worked in the restaurant industry after that until finally I thought I had a grasp on what I needed to do what I do.”

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“I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.”

“What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.”

Life Is Food Hair Surface Awful Nevertheless Soup Floating

Author: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.”

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Author:Gustave Flaubert

“I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.”

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“You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.”

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Book:Flaubert's Parrot

Source: Flaubert's Parrot

“If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.”

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Book:The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857

Source: The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857

“For friends... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble.”

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Book:The Works of Francis Bacon: Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, and Lord High Chancellor of England

Source: The Works of Francis Bacon: Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, and Lord High Chancellor of England

“When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.”

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Book:Flaubert's Parrot

Source: Flaubert's Parrot