Gustave Flaubert

Isn__ __ot to be bored_ one of the principal goals of life?

He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that__ for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I__l be bound _ you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters?

Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and 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.

Speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.

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

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fin

The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.

Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitterness.

With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady__ album _ and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.

Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country, that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black, has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.

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.

Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?

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

Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.

Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.