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Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Pissing
Drinking
Ocean
History
Writing
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More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
Gustave Flaubert
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Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
Gustave Flaubert
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A thing derided is a thing dead a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
Gustave Flaubert
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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Gustave Flaubert
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One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
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On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
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Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?
Gustave Flaubert
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He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height
Gustave Flaubert
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The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
Gustave Flaubert
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I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.
Gustave Flaubert
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Iced champagne was served, and the feel of the cold wine in her mouth gave Emma a shiver that ran over her from head to toe.
Gustave Flaubert
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Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.
Gustave Flaubert
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Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.
Gustave Flaubert
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We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
Gustave Flaubert
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Beautiful things spoil nothing.
Gustave Flaubert
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Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
Gustave Flaubert
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But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.
Gustave Flaubert
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Doesn't it seem to you, asked Madame Bovary, that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?
Gustave Flaubert
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Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
Gustave Flaubert
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Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
Gustave Flaubert