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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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I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
Gustave Flaubert
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Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Gustave Flaubert
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The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!
Gustave Flaubert
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There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.
Gustave Flaubert
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By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
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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It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
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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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.
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.
Gustave Flaubert
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What an elder sees sitting the young can't see standing.
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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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
Gustave Flaubert
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Doesn't it seem to you, asked Madame Bovary, that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?
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's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
Gustave Flaubert
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Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
Gustave Flaubert
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We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.
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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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