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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Enterprise
Idiot
Stupidity
Humility
Enterprises
Succeed
Humiliating
Fool
Idiots
Inspirational
Statistics
Nothing
Failed

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Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.
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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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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
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Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
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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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There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
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Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
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I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
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A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
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For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
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I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.
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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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I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
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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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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
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She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.
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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
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For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.
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