Quote

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Fingers
Ears
Whose
Violinist
Within
Reproduce
Sound
Irritated
True
Hears
Writing
Precisely
Like
Refuse

More quotes by 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.
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Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
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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.
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L'Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.
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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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All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
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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There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
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The morality of art is in its very beauty.
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Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
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What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
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The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
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Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
Gustave Flaubert
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One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
Gustave Flaubert
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He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
Gustave Flaubert
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[The artist] is like a pump he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
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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… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!
Gustave Flaubert
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For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.
Gustave Flaubert