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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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Philosophy

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Sentimental Education (1869)

One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped.

Robert Anton Wilson

Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.

Martin Buber Power and Love (1926)

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended.

John C. Lilly The Human Biocomputer (1974)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gustave Flaubert (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.