Time & Perspective Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert is quietly detonating the bourgeois fantasy that life’s high points come with trophies attached. For a 19th-century novelist who made an art out of dissecting delusion, “so-called days of success” is the tell: a raised eyebrow in prose form. The phrase treats public validation as a social costume, something worn, admired, then hung back up. Glory, he argues, isn’t the applause line. It’s the private, almost chemical moment when despair flips into defiance.

The sentence is built like a pressure change. It starts low - “dejection and despair” - then pivots on a physical verb: “you feel rise in you.” That upward motion matters. Flaubert isn’t selling optimism; he’s describing an interior event, an involuntary surge that interrupts self-pity. The “challenge to life” reads less like a motivational poster than a dare issued from the psyche: if the world won’t give you meaning, you manufacture it through resistance.

The subtext is Flaubert’s lifelong suspicion of easy narratives. Success is legible, repeatable, and therefore suspect; it can be mimicked. The rebounding will, by contrast, can’t be faked because it’s born in conditions no one would choose. Even “promise of future accomplishments” stays carefully provisional: not accomplishments themselves, but the promise - a forward-looking contract you sign with yourself when nothing else is guaranteed.

Contextually, this is a writer who knew long stretches of frustration, aesthetic discipline, and the grinding lag between effort and recognition. He’s elevating the hinge moments artists and ordinary people share: the day you don’t win, but you decide you’re still playing.