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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Write
Order
Writing
Men
Superhuman
Needed
Literature

More quotes by 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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What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
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Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
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The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves.
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Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
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A thing derided is a thing dead a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
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One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
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He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height
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What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
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A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
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One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
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The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
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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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Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.
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And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.
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Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?
Gustave Flaubert
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. I've never sought it (though I desire it) and seek it less and less.
Gustave Flaubert