My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTI have dreamed much and have done very little.
More Gustave Flaubert Quotes
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To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
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Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
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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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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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We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.
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On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
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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 mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
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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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Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
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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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A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.
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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 existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT