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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
Literature
Write
Order
Writing
Men
Superhuman
Needed

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
Gustave Flaubert
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A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
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.
Gustave Flaubert
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DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
Gustave Flaubert
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The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
Gustave Flaubert
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Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
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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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
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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One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.
Gustave Flaubert
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Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
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
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The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.
Gustave Flaubert
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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