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What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

Gustave Flaubert

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Human Music Rhythm Speech Stars
The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Illusion One Liner Public Work
The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Hold Important Soul World
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Invention Perfection Poetry Precise True
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

Believe Death Difficult Feeling Oneself Person
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Hope Love Perfume Plant Ruin Time
What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Achievement Angry Difficult Lust Wonder
My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Imagination Myself Reality
All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Enough Interesting Yourself
The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Level Life Sea Writing
We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Cry Enjoyment Human Laughter Myself Suffering Thinking
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Current heavy Ideas Strong
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Life Order Original Regular Violence Work
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

Brain Day Finding Hands Head Stay Word
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Corruption Heart Love Need Yourself
What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Beautiful Moral

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

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What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

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Popular Authors

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