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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Image
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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
Image
How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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
Image
We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!
Gustave Flaubert
Image
By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Mediocrity cherishes rules as for me, I hate them I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
There is no truth. There is only perception.
Gustave Flaubert
Image
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