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I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.

Gustave Flaubert

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
For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Beyond Circumference Herself Universe
Exuberance is better than taste.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Better One Liner Taste
All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Enough Interesting Yourself
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
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Enterprise Failure Humiliate Idiot See Success
The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Hold Important Soul World
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

Acceptance Beautiful Feeling Greatness Society
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
I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Believe Happiness Myself Thinking Tranquility
My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Imagination Myself Reality
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Current heavy Ideas Strong
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
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Democracy Dreams Level Raise Stupidity
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.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Believe Death Difficult Feeling Oneself Person
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

I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.

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I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.

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