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I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Conviction
Finally
Inner
Conscience
Calls
Literature
Vanity
Everything
Firm
Come
Basis
Bases

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One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
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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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Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.
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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?
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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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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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It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
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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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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
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Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.
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One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
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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.
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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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It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
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