Gustave Flaubert - Happiness Quotes

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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.
Variant translation: To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

Gustave Flaubert
I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.

Gustave Flaubert
He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought him.

Gustave Flaubert
She [Madame Bovary] had that indefinable beauty that comes from happiness, enthusiasm, success— a beauty that is nothing more or less than a harmony of temperament and circumstances.

Gustave Flaubert
Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn't come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words bliss, passion, and rapture - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

Gustave Flaubert
Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom

Gustave Flaubert
It is strange, how I was born with little faith in happiness. While still very young I had a complete presentiment of life.

Gustave Flaubert