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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.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Completely
Seventeen
Loved
Ruin
Literature
Birthday
Age
Ruins
Happiness
Catch
Today
Idiot
Would
Constitution
Like
Soon
Smallpox

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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
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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 principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
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I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
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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.
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Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
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After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. I've never sought it (though I desire it) and seek it less and less.
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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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What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to 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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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
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Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
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What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
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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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Reveal art conceal the artist.
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Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.
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