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One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Feelings
Art
Form
Everything
Without
Mustn
Nothing
Arts
Believe
Feeling
Always
Literature

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One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
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Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
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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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Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
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Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.
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Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
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(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.
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Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
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It seems to me... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
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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.
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It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
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For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
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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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For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.
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She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.
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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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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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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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Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
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