Gustave Flaubert Doubt Quotations

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.

Happy are they who don't doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page. I myself hesitate, I falter, I become angry and fearful, my drive diminishes as my taste improves, and I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well-proportioned paragraph.

Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.

She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.

It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.