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 FLAUBERTYou 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.
More Gustave Flaubert Quotes
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One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
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To be simple is no small matter.
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What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!
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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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One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
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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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There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
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Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.
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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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I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
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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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It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
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There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
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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 need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
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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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The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
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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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All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
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I have dreamed much and have done very little.
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Read in order to live.
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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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Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT