Daily Inspiration Quote by Gustave Flaubert

“Exuberance is better than taste” lands like a provocation from a man best known for the opposite: Flaubert, patron saint of le mot juste, the novelist who could spend a week sanding a paragraph until it gleamed. That tension is the point. He isn’t renouncing precision; he’s warning what precision can become when it calcifies into good manners.

“Taste” in 19th-century France wasn’t just aesthetic discernment. It was a social password, a way the bourgeoisie policed art into acceptability: balanced, restrained, properly elevated. Flaubert’s work is full of people ruined by that kind of “good taste” - not because they lack it, but because they mistake it for life. Madame Bovary’s tragedy isn’t only romantic delusion; it’s the secondhand quality of her desires, pre-approved by novels, etiquette, and the marketplace. Taste, in that sense, is imitation with better posture.

Exuberance, by contrast, is risk. It’s excess, appetite, the messy force that actually generates art before the editor arrives. Flaubert is hinting that a sentence can be impeccably correct and still dead. Exuberance may miss, may embarrass itself, may spill over its own borders - but it has heat, and heat is what taste often exists to cool.

The subtext is almost ethical: prefer the alive to the approved. In a culture that rewards refinement as a kind of moral superiority, Flaubert argues for intensity as a truer intelligence - a refusal to let “good judgment” become a substitute for genuine feeling, or genuine vision.