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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
Ideas
Oar
Pens
Current
Currents
Heavy
Strong

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
Gustave Flaubert
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Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
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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.
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Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
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I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
Gustave Flaubert
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Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
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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One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
Gustave Flaubert
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The future is the worst thing about the present.
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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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
Gustave Flaubert
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I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
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You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
Gustave Flaubert
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Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
Gustave Flaubert
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Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
Gustave Flaubert
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I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.
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Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.
Gustave Flaubert
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He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.
Gustave Flaubert