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What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Oar
Pens
Current
Currents
Heavy
Strong
Ideas

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
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.
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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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It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
Gustave Flaubert
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Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
Gustave Flaubert
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Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
Gustave Flaubert
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I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
Gustave Flaubert
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Antiquite . en tout ce qui s'y rapporte: Est poncif, embe tant! etc. Antiquity. And everything to do with it, cliche d and boring.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.
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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A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
Gustave Flaubert
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Everything is there: the love of Art.
Gustave Flaubert
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I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
Gustave Flaubert
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As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.
Gustave Flaubert
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We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!
Gustave Flaubert
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We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself!
Gustave Flaubert
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Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.
Gustave Flaubert