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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
Come
Basis
Bases
Conviction
Finally
Inner
Conscience
Calls
Literature
Vanity
Everything
Firm

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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
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It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
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Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
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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.
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The future is the worst thing about the present.
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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
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Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.
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Reveal art conceal the artist.
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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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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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(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.
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A thing derided is a thing dead a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
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The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
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But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.
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I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
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Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
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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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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
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Iced champagne was served, and the feel of the cold wine in her mouth gave Emma a shiver that ran over her from head to toe.
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There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
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