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.

Gustave Flaubert

Categorized in : Stories Flow Aqueducts

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

Gustave Flaubert

congratulations accomplishment blessing

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

Gustave Flaubert

adventure inspirational travel

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

Gustave Flaubert

unshakable literature stupid

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

wise inspirational life

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

Gustave Flaubert

nature sky believe

I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports.... When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.

Gustave Flaubert

sexy love thinking

There is no truth. There is only perception.

Gustave Flaubert

perspective perception truth

Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.

Gustave Flaubert

done bears art

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

Gustave Flaubert

poverty language stars

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.

Gustave Flaubert

rumor inspirational men

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

Gustave Flaubert

work inspirational life

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Gustave Flaubert

stupidity humility inspirational

Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain?

Gustave Flaubert

ocean math boys

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

Gustave Flaubert

dream trying

Human 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 Flaubert

dance stars long

Read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert

reading order book

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

Gustave Flaubert

poetry inspirational life

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

Gustave Flaubert

writing men order

I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.

Gustave Flaubert

afternoon morning

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

Gustave Flaubert

ocean drinking writing