Daily Inspiration Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert is selling aspiration while quietly warning you about the bill that comes due. The line has the sheen of a proverb, but it’s too elegantly conditional to be pure uplift: “I believe” distances the speaker from certainty, and “if one always” pushes the idea toward obsession. This isn’t a casual suggestion to daydream; it’s a thought experiment about what sustained attention does to a person. Keep your eyes on the “skies” long enough and you don’t just want flight - you start to grow into the wanting.

That’s classic Flaubert: the romantic impulse rendered both gorgeous and slightly suspect. In the 19th-century French literary tug-of-war between Romanticism’s hunger for the sublime and Realism’s appetite for the actual, he built his reputation on exposing how fantasies can be exquisitely motivating and quietly destructive. The wings here are metaphorical, but also bodily: desire becomes habit, habit becomes identity. You become the kind of creature who can’t comfortably live on the ground.

The subtext is less “dream big” than “you will be shaped by what you stare at.” That’s a psychological claim dressed up as lyricism. It flatters the dreamer, then slips in a darker corollary: wings are not just freedoms, they’re deformities relative to ordinary life. If everyone around you is walking, flight turns into exile.

Contextually, it fits a novelist obsessed with the costs of longing - how imagination can elevate a life, and how it can make reality feel like an insult.