Philosophy Quote by Gustave Flaubert — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“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.”

“Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.”

“I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world”

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

“How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.”

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

“If you have seen everything in life, you want to say to people, "Cut the drama and come to the point.”

“И на съвършените съвършенството е несъвършено. Св. Иоан Лествичник”

“Philosophy is the critically reflective, systematically articulated attempt to illumine our human experience in depth and set it in a vision of the whole.”

“The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.”

“You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.”

“The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given….”