The principal thing in this world is to keep one’s soul aloft.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTYou need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
More Gustave Flaubert Quotes
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
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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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The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
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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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Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
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It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
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For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
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Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
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Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.
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The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
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Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
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The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
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I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
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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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There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.
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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
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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!
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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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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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It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.
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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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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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A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.
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Exuberance is better than taste.
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT