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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
Idiot
Today
Constitution
Would
Soon
Smallpox
Like
Seventeen
Completely
Ruin
Loved
Birthday
Literature
Ruins
Age
Catch
Happiness
More quotes by Gustave Flaubert
Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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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To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
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Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
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Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
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Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
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Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
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My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.
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I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.
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The morality of art is in its very beauty.
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Stupidity is something unshakable nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
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Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
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I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
Gustave Flaubert
The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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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.
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I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
Gustave Flaubert
There is no truth. There is only perception.
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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
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