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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
Always
Hopes
Desperate
Doubt
Hope
Must

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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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Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
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What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.
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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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For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.
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One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.
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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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L'Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.
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By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.
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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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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
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Everything is there: the love of Art.
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
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Doesn't it seem to you, asked Madame Bovary, that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Gustave Flaubert
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Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Gustave Flaubert
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How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.
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