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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Everything
Precise
Imperfect
Perfectly
Poetry
Literature
Sure
True
Invents
May
Geometry

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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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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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
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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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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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Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
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Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
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Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
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As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
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Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.
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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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Everything is there: the love of Art.
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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.
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Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.
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Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.
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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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In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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Beautiful things spoil nothing.
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