Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTOur ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
More Gustave Flaubert Quotes
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The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
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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.
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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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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
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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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Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
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One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
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Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
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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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Read in order to live.
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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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I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT -
Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT -
There is no truth. There is only perception.
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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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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.
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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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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
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The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.
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One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
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Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
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You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
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You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.
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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.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT -
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT