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If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.
Gustave Flaubert
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Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote suggests that true artists experience life differently, often to extremes, leading to suffering or intense joy.

Gustave Flaubert's quote reflects the unique perspective of artists who engage deeply with life, noting that this engagement can lead to a distorted view of reality. By participating intensely in their experiences, artists may suffer or revel excessively, which differentiates them from the average person. Flaubert implies that this extreme sensitivity is a kind of monstrosity, as artists wrestle with the consequences of denying the natural limitations and truths of life.

Themes

ArtistLifeExperienceSufferingJoyNature

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about creativity, one might use this quote to emphasize the emotional journey of artists.

More from Gustave Flaubert

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.
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She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.
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In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on.
Gustave FlaubertRead
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.
Gustave FlaubertRead
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
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Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.
Gustave FlaubertRead

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