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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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There is no truth. There is only perception.
Gustave Flaubert
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Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.
Gustave Flaubert
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He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.
Gustave Flaubert
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I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.
Gustave Flaubert
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On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
Gustave Flaubert
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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
Gustave Flaubert
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It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
Gustave Flaubert
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You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
Gustave Flaubert
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I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
Gustave Flaubert
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The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
Gustave Flaubert
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And he beholds the moon like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
Gustave Flaubert
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A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
Gustave Flaubert
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Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
Gustave Flaubert
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Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
Gustave Flaubert
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I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
Gustave Flaubert
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But an infinity of passions can be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a tiny space.
Gustave Flaubert
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Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
Gustave Flaubert
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For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
Gustave Flaubert
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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
Gustave Flaubert
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The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.
Gustave Flaubert