To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
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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Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
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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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The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
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Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
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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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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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There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT -
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 is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
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One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
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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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Exuberance is better than taste.
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What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!
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You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT