Gustave Flaubert

"One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness."

"Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings."

"The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy."

"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."

"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost."

"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."

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

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

"I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within."

"Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work."

"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."

"The public wants work which flatters its illusions."

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

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."

"Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work."

"When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women"

"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."

"Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living."

"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."