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The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.

Gustave Flaubert

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Imagination Myself Reality
Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Ordinary Small Tender
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Happiness Lost Selfish Stupidity
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.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Cry Enjoyment Human Laughter Myself Suffering Thinking
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
To be simple is no small matter.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Minimalism One Liner Simplicity
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.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Art Avoid Horrible Life Live World
It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Creation Delicious Universe Writing Yourself
Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Consequence Goal Success
Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Conclusion Consist Reach Stupidity
A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Laughter Man Strong Suffering
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Ambitious Children Instruction Live Order Purpose Reading
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
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Interest See Sight Yourself
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Life Particle Poetry
Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Drinking History Writing

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.

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The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.

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