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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
May
Geometry
Everything
Precise
Imperfect
Perfectly
Poetry
Literature
Sure
True
Invents

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
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Reveal art conceal the artist.
Gustave Flaubert
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I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.
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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
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Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter
Gustave Flaubert
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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
Gustave Flaubert
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Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
Gustave Flaubert
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All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
Gustave Flaubert
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One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
Gustave Flaubert
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Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
Gustave Flaubert
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When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women
Gustave Flaubert
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And he beholds the moon like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
Gustave Flaubert
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Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
Gustave Flaubert
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We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
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.
Gustave Flaubert
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Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
Gustave Flaubert