"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 so...
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
~ Gustave Flaubert ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
More Gustave Flaubert quotes
"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 bitter...
"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.
"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 th...
"One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
"An overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like. I want to know what they do, where they're from, their names, what they'...
"Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
"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...
"Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for beauty, execration of lite...
"From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden...
"As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will ther...
"Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.
"There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
"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.