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Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Comes
Doubted
Illness
Madness
Leads
Doubt
Knowledge

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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.
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COLD. Healthier than heat.
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You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
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As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.
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For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
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But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.
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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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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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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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One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
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Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
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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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One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
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The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
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On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
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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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
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What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
Gustave Flaubert