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There is no truth. There is only perception.

Gustave Flaubert

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Invention Perfection Poetry Precise True
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Blow Chill Love Request
Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Death Education Learning Life Talk
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.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Achievement Angry Difficult Lust Wonder
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.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Brain Day Finding Hands Head Stay Word
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Interest See Sight Yourself
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Current heavy Ideas Strong
The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Illusion One Liner Public Work
My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Imagination Myself Reality
What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Beautiful Moral
I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Morning Myself Removal
On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Art Clumsy Occasion Ordinary Reveal World
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

Better Gratitude History Ignorance King Ordinary Ourselves Person Perspective Time
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.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Eat Life Surface Yourself
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Life Particle Poetry
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.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Human Music Rhythm Speech Stars

There is no truth. There is only perception.

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There is no truth. There is only perception.

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