A Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

Gustave Flaubert

Quote Topics

Drinking History Like Ocean Writing Writing History

Quote Author

Gustave Flaubert
French - Novelist
December 12, 1821 - May 8, 1880

The grace of the Guru is like an ocean. If one comes with a cup he will only get a cupful. It is no use complaining of the niggardliness of the ocean. The bigger the vessel the more one will be able to carry. It is entirely up to him.

Ramana Maharshi

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.

Anne Sexton

If you approach the ocean with a cup, you can only take away a cupful; if you approach it with a bucket you can take away a bucketful.

Ramana Maharshi

It struck me then how much the past - not just the past but history and family - was like the ocean tide. It was always the same ocean, but the waves made it fresh and new each time.

Aimee Friedman

Same thing every year, getting up at the crack of dawn, drinking, fighting, throwing up, pissing on walls and then you leave the house and things get bad.

Greg Fitzsimmons

Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

Lyndon B. Johnson

There's an obvious romance to being the drinking writer. But if I'm drinking, I'm not writing.

Liz Brixius

I like to do the research of history and the creativity of writing fiction. I am creating this thing which I think is twice as difficult as writing either history or fiction.

Philippa Gregory

I knew, even as we touched that I had never wanted anything more in all my life. All my crabbed cravings were as a cupful of pond water beside the vast ocean of longing I felt surging through me. My head swam; my eyes blurred. I burned from the inside out as if my blood and bones were consumed with liquid fire.

Stephen R. Lawhead

There is a long history in country music of songs celebrating drinking and lamenting drinking. Country songs for the most part have always been heavily rooted in reality. The first artists were the people next door. They would sing on their porch or in their living room or at a barn dance. They sang about what they knew, and a lot of that was drinking.

Chet Atkins

I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.

Joseph Brodsky

In this ocean of hours I'm all the time drinking.

Bob Dylan

My grandfather was Jacques Cousteau, a pioneer of ocean exploration and the co-inventor of scuba diving. Back in the 1940s when he tested out his invention which allowed humans to swim freely in the ocean with a portable air source for the first time in history, very little of the ocean had been explored let alone captured on film.

Philippe Cousteau, Jr.

I write songs by sitting around in bars, so drinking songs are a little obvious. It's surprising that I don't write entirely drinking songs, since I am, in fact, drinking while writing the song. Drinking and love are the two principal sources of pleasure outside of music. There's only so many sources of pleasure, really. That's about it. Well, there are other arts as well. But none of them are as pleasurable as music, on a physical level.