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
Work
Much
Flesh
Style
Words
Soul

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.
Gustave Flaubert
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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
Gustave Flaubert
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I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
Gustave Flaubert
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Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.
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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Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
Gustave Flaubert
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Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
Gustave Flaubert
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I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
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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A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
Gustave Flaubert
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Talent is a long patience.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
Gustave Flaubert
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A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
Gustave Flaubert
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But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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The morality of art is in its very beauty.
Gustave Flaubert
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And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert