Quotation by Gustave Flaubert

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.
Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), French novelist. Letter, April 24, 1852, to Louise Colet, trans. by Stratton Buck (1966). Correspondance, II, p. 395, Conard (1926-1933).
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