Quote

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Flesh
Style
Words
Soul
Work
Much

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
Gustave Flaubert
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
Gustave Flaubert
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And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
Gustave Flaubert
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Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
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He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.
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All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
Gustave Flaubert
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You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
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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DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
Gustave Flaubert
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La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert
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As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.
Gustave Flaubert
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To be simple is no small matter.
Gustave Flaubert
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When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
Gustave Flaubert
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You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.
Gustave Flaubert