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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.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Literature
Call
Though
Hate
Even
Realism
Made
Priests
Decided
High

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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
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I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.
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One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
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Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?
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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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Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
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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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By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
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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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Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
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I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter
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I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
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He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
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What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
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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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There is no truth. There is only perception.
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There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.
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