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One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Doubt
Hope
Must
Always
Hopes
Desperate

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The morality of art is in its very beauty.
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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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We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself!
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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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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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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
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All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
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For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.
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Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
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DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'
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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
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I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.
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[The artist] is like a pump he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
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I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.
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He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
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May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!
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Years passed and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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