Gustave Flaubert Quotes

For the European who came from a community of congestion and confinement, the West was beyond dreaming; it must have inspired him to formulate an idea of the infinite. There he could walk through geologic time; he could see into eternity.

It is extraordinary to see the sea; what a spectacle! She is so unfettered that one wonders whether it is possible that she again become calm.

I love the sea because it is boundless.

Fish love the ocean. Snakes move like earth-fish inside a mountain,well away from seawater. Certain sunfish,though,turn snakes into ocean lovers.

Love rests on no foundation. It is an endless ocean, with no beginning or end.

The sea! the sea! the open sea! The blue, the fresh, the ever free! Without a mark, without a bound, It runneth the earth's wide regions round; It plays with the clouds; it mocks the skies; Or like a cradled creature lies.

Meet me where the sky touches the sea. Wait for me where the world begins.

A scarf has to be the most beautiful thing ever invented to wear! It's a winding, a continuity, an infinity! I love things that are endless, I hate them to stop. It's like order and disorder: I rather love disorder and things that move, it's a state where one gets more things done!

She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.

I shall sleep, and move with the moving ships, Change as the winds change, veer in the tide.

'Mind and matter,' said the lady in the wig, 'glide swift into the vortex if immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination.'

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

The only true liberty is in the service of that which is beyond all limits, beyond all definitions, beyond all human appreciation: that which is All, and which therefore is no limited or individual thing: The All is no-thing, for if it were to be a single thing separated from all other things, it would not be All.

My heart is burning with love. All I can see is this flame. My heart is burning with passion, like waves on an ocean. I'm at home, wherever I am. And in the room of lovers, I can see with closed eyes the beauty that dances. Behind the veils, intoxicated with love, I too dance the rhythm of this moving world.

Be quiet now and wait. It may be that the ocean one, the one we desire so to move into and become, desires us out here on land a little longer, going our sundry roads to the shore.

Sometimes it happens that you become one, in some rare moment. Watch the ocean, the tremendous wildness of it--and suddenly you forget your split, your schizophrenia; you relax. Or, moving in the Himalayas, seeing the virgin snow on the Himalayan peaks, suddenly a coolness surrounds you and you need not be false because there is no other human being to be false to. You fall together.

The creation of the world is not only a process which moves from God to humanity. God demands newness from humanity; God awaits the works of human freedom.

I haven't rebelled yet. I don't know, I think maybe just moving up here (to L.A.) by myself counts. But I never really felt the urge. I was always given so much freedom as a kid. My mom's motto was, 'My trust is yours to lose, so I'll give you every trust in the world. But the second I give you an inch and you take a mile, I'm going to pull it back.'

Man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.

The Infinite is only a manner of speaking.

Nothing but a speck we seem In the waste of waters round, Floating, floating like a dream, Outward bound.

I never really understood the word ‘loneliness’. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.

...What is more like love than the ocean? You can play in it, drown in it...it can be clear and bright enough to hurt your eyes, or covered in fog, hidden behind a curve of roads and then suddenly there in full glory. It's waves come like breaths, in and out, body stretched to forever in it's possibilities, and yet it's heart lies deep, not fully knowable, inconceivably majestic.

The humblest peasant is as free in the sight of God as the proudest monarch that ever swayed a sceptre. Liberty is a spirit sent from God and like its great Author is no respecter of persons.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.