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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Navel
Wade
Sea
Writer
Must
Writing
Life

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.
Gustave Flaubert
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Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
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I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.
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He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
Gustave Flaubert
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Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
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A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
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Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Gustave Flaubert
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!
Gustave Flaubert
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It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
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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As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.
Gustave Flaubert
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As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.
Gustave Flaubert
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As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
Gustave Flaubert
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For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
Gustave Flaubert
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Antiquite . en tout ce qui s'y rapporte: Est poncif, embe tant! etc. Antiquity. And everything to do with it, cliche d and boring.
Gustave Flaubert
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
Gustave Flaubert
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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
Gustave Flaubert
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Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?
Gustave Flaubert
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
Gustave Flaubert
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Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.
Gustave Flaubert