On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERTOne’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
More Gustave Flaubert Quotes
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The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
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I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
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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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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
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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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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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You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
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Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
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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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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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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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After 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.
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Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
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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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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
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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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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 most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.
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The future is the worst thing about the present.
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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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You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.
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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
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Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
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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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Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT