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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
Heavy
Strong
Ideas
Oar
Pens
Current
Currents

More quotes by 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 idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.
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
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I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
Gustave Flaubert
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In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.
Gustave Flaubert
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What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
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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Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
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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L'Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.
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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Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
Gustave Flaubert
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She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.
Gustave Flaubert
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You can't find the soul with a scalpel.
Gustave Flaubert
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Everything is there: the love of Art.
Gustave Flaubert
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Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.
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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Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.
Gustave Flaubert
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!
Gustave Flaubert
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Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
Gustave Flaubert