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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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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Exorcise
Oppresses
Vent
Imagine
Art
Giving
Life

More quotes by 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.
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Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
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There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
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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.
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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.
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I have patience in all things - as far as the antechamber.
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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.
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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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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
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In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.
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Years passed and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.
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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
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The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
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One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
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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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For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
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Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.
Gustave Flaubert