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Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Reality
Doe
Confirms
Conform
Conformity
Ideal
Ideals

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A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
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Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
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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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To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
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Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
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As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.
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One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
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Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
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Reveal art conceal the artist.
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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
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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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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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I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
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After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
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As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.
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The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
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The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
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… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!
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