Daily Inspiration Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert turns style from ornament into metabolism. "One never tires of what is well written" isn’t a cozy compliment to pretty sentences; it’s a provocation aimed at anyone who treats prose as a delivery system for ideas. By calling style "life" and "the very blood of thought", he flips the usual hierarchy. Content isn’t the noble body and style the fashionable outfit. Style is the circulatory system that keeps meaning alive, moving, and felt.

The line carries Flaubert’s signature severity: an almost moral insistence that language must be exact, not because correctness is virtuous, but because imprecision kills experience. "Well written" here implies the hard, obsessive labor he was famous for - the gueuloir, the practice of reading aloud until a sentence had the right rhythm. Subtext: boredom is often a symptom of bad craft, not of serious subjects. The reader tires when prose fails to metabolize thought into sound, pace, and pressure.

Context matters. Mid-19th-century France is awash in realism, journalism, political churn, and the growing appetite for fast, consumable print. Flaubert, who could spend days on a paragraph, plants a flag against haste. He’s also pushing back on the idea that novels should justify themselves through moral lessons. Style becomes the novel’s ethics: attention, discipline, and a refusal to lie with easy language.

It works because it’s visceral. Blood is intimate and nonnegotiable; you can’t separate it from the organism. Flaubert makes the case that to care about thought while dismissing style is like praising a mind while starving its body.