Quote

Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Tears
Stars
Water
Unrequited
Three
Drops
Heart
Memorable
Things
Sky
Sea
Infinite

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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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
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La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.
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Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.
Gustave Flaubert
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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
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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I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.
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Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?
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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
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One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
Gustave Flaubert
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How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.
Gustave Flaubert
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We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.
Gustave Flaubert
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Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
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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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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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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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
Gustave Flaubert
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(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.
Gustave Flaubert
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What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
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Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.
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I have dreamed much and have done very little.
Gustave Flaubert