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
Related Quotes:
- Write like you speak with the ‘rhythms of human speech,’ as William Zinsser said, and in as few words as possible. Use action verbs to carry water. – Sandra E Lamb
- Group idea sessions rarely work. Why? Members too busy knocking down insights to hear the tap-tap of revelation – Phillip Gary Smith
- Beyond the stars you see are other stars, stars beyond stars,’ she told him, ‘and all are dreams, like shoals of fish in the oceans of the night. – Keith Miller
- I don’t write poems to melt your heart.I write them,so our heartscan melt together. – Subhan Zein
- Teddy bears, not grizzly bears, get invited in for honey. – Richelle E Goodrich
- Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you. – Mike Birbiglia
- An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space. – Gustave Flaubert
- Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again. – Gustave Flaubert
- The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy. – Gustave Flaubert
- By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream – Gustave Flaubert
- Thought is the greatest of pleasures -”pleasure itself is only imagination-”have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams? – Gustave Flaubert
- How badly arranged the world is. What is the purpose of ugliness, suffering, sadness? Why our powerless dreams? Why everything? – Gustave Flaubert
- The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie. – Gustave Flaubert
- He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex. – Gustave Flaubert
- …those works that don’t touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art. – Gustave Flaubert
- Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence. – Gustave Flaubert
- Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work. – Gustave Flaubert
- People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along. – Gustave Flaubert
- …and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver. – Gustave Flaubert
- She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage. – Gustave Flaubert
- Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting. – Gustave Flaubert
- One’s duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us. – Gustave Flaubert
- On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters. – Gustave Flaubert
- Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can’t stiffen up enough to create them. – Gustave Flaubert
- The world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. We’re lucky to be living now. – Gustave Flaubert
- Sadness is a vice. – Gustave Flaubert
- Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex… – Gustave Flaubert
- Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. – Gustave Flaubert
- But vilifying those we love always detaches us from them a little. We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands. – Gustave Flaubert
- Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands. – Gustave Flaubert
- Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force. – Gustave Flaubert
- Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation. – Gustave Flaubert
- I have patience in all things -“ as far as the antechamber. – Gustave Flaubert
- Charles went to kiss her shoulder.-Leave me alone! she said, you’re creasing my dress. – Gustave Flaubert
- Charles went to kiss her shoulder.-Leave me alone! she said, you’re creasing my dress. – Gustave Flaubert
- Some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her. – Gustave Flaubert
- Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker. – Gustave Flaubert
- Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. – Gustave Flaubert
- Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. – Gustave Flaubert
- Irony takes nothing away from pathos. – Gustave Flaubert