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On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Spirit
Interpreter
Art
Shake
Certain
Revealed
Whole
Spirits
World
Shakes
Worlds
Occasions
Ordinary
Interpreters

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We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
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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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Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
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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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One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.
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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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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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Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.
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COLD. Healthier than heat.
Gustave Flaubert
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[The artist] is like a pump he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
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I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
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To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
Gustave Flaubert
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As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.
Gustave Flaubert
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Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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Iced champagne was served, and the feel of the cold wine in her mouth gave Emma a shiver that ran over her from head to toe.
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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
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Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
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