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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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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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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. I've never sought it (though I desire it) and seek it less and less.
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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.
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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.
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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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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
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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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Years passed and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.
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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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Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
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Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
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The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.
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How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
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But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.
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Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
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To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
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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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By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
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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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