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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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It seems to me... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
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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Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
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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There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
Gustave Flaubert
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COLD. Healthier than heat.
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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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
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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There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
Gustave Flaubert
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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
Gustave Flaubert
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The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
Gustave Flaubert
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One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
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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I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.
Gustave Flaubert
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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Gustave Flaubert
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You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.
Gustave Flaubert
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After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
Gustave Flaubert