Gustave Flaubert

"Creativity flourishes where constraints exist."

"To be truly free, one must first free oneself from fear."

"The quality of one's life is determined by the quality of one's questions."

"Patience is not passive; it is the active virtue of those who persevere."

"Beauty is not found in perfection, but in authenticity."

"The greatest education comes from living deliberately."

"Success is the ability to move from one failure to the next without loss of enthusiasm."

"A true friend is one who loves you despite knowing who you truly are."

"Family is the foundation upon which we build our lives."

"The only constant in life is change itself."

"Motivation comes from understanding the 'why' of our pursuits."

"In solitude, we find the echoes of our true selves."

"The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible yet all-powerful."

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to prevent oneself from being cast into prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

"Traveling makes one modest. You see what an enormous place the world is."

"The more one owns, the more it owns you."

"I love my work with a love that is frenzied and perverse."

"Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, then for a few friends, then for money."

"The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you."

"Talent is a long patience."

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

"Do not read as children do to amuse themselves, nor as the ambitious do to instruct themselves. No, read in order to live."

"The secret of masterpieces is to find the objective in the subjective."

"Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit."

"Stupidity is something unshakeable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it."

"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of."

"Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."

"You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies."

"How strange it is to be anything at all."

"I hate all bungling as I hate sin, but most of all I hate a bungler's modesty."