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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Discovering
Belief
Inspirational
Art
Writing
Believe
Life

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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[The artist] is like a pump he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
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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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Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.
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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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Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
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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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Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
Gustave Flaubert
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He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.
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A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
Gustave Flaubert
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Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
Gustave Flaubert
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Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.
Gustave Flaubert
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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Gustave Flaubert
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One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.
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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Stupidity is something unshakable nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
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Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
Gustave Flaubert