My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTThe future is the worst thing about the present.
More Gustave Flaubert Quotes
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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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The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
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There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
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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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Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
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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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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
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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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You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.
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It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
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Read in order to live.
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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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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
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On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT