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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
Conscience
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Literature
Vanity
Everything
Firm
Come
Basis
Bases
Conviction
Finally
Inner
More quotes by Gustave Flaubert
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
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I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
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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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What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
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To be simple is no small matter.
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The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
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The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
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Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
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What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
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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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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
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Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?
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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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Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
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I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
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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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The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.
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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
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