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Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Alone
Reads
Read
Besides
Ideas
Main
Better
Admire
Thing
Follow
Work
Please
Like
Stupid
Public

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
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The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
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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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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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For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
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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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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.
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Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
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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 most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
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Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.
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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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I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
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Antiquite . en tout ce qui s'y rapporte: Est poncif, embe tant! etc. Antiquity. And everything to do with it, cliche d and boring.
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He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
Gustave Flaubert
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Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
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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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And he beholds the moon like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
Gustave Flaubert
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Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Gustave Flaubert
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It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
Gustave Flaubert