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Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Love
Springtime
Perfume
Ruins
Plant
Literature
Hope
Everything
Perfumes
Even
Clings

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
Gustave Flaubert
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Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
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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.
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Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
Gustave Flaubert
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Mediocrity cherishes rules as for me, I hate them I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.
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Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
Gustave Flaubert
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It seems to me... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
Gustave Flaubert
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I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.
Gustave Flaubert
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I have patience in all things - as far as the antechamber.
Gustave Flaubert
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May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!
Gustave Flaubert
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As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.
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Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.
Gustave Flaubert
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And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.
Gustave Flaubert
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For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
Gustave Flaubert
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Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
Gustave Flaubert
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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
Gustave Flaubert
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And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
Gustave Flaubert
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Reveal art conceal the artist.
Gustave Flaubert
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I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
Gustave Flaubert
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As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.
Gustave Flaubert