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 FLAUBERTAfter 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.
More Gustave Flaubert Quotes
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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.
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Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
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Read in order to live.
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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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There is no truth. There is only perception.
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Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
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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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Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
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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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She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.
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What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
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I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
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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.
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What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT