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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.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Lost
Selfishness
Three
Stupidity
Good
Selfish
Intellectual
Health
Stupid
Healthcare
Though
Requirements
Happiness
Lacking

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What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
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Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. I've never sought it (though I desire it) and seek it less and less.
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A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
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Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
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Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.
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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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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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On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
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Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
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I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
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I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
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You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.
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For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
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One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
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