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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
Literature
Birthday
Age
Ruins
Happiness
Catch
Today
Idiot
Would
Constitution
Like
Soon
Smallpox
Completely
Seventeen
Loved
Ruin

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A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
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A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
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You can't find the soul with a scalpel.
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
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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.
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Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.
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And he beholds the moon like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
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We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!
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Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
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One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
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He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
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He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height
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I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.
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