The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTTo be simple is no small matter.
More Gustave Flaubert Quotes
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You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.
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I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
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The principal thing in this world is to keep one’s soul aloft.
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I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
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Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.
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Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.
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Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
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The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
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A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
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One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
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Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
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One’s duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
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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.
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I have dreamed much and have done very little.
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There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.
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Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.
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Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.
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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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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.
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Exuberance is better than taste.
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Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT