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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.

Gustave Flaubert

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Invention Oneself True
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 need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Corruption Heart Love Need Yourself
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
What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Beautiful Moral
One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Existence God Oneself Thinking
What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Compare Diamond Language Poverty Stars
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
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.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Discover Forest Harmony Listening Try Waves
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
The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Hold Important Soul World
One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Happiness Life Philosophy Tree Woman
The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Challenge Day Feeling Glory Life Moments Promise Rise Success
Exuberance is better than taste.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Better One Liner Taste
Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Drinking History Writing
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Enterprise Failure Humiliate Idiot See Success

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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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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Popular Authors

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