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 FLAUBERTNothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
More Gustave Flaubert Quotes
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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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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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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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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!
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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.
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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
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What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!
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Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.
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Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
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What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
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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.
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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.
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For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
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Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.
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Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
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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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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.
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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
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Exuberance is better than taste.
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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.
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To be simple is no small matter.
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All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
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It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT