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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Writing
Life
Navel
Wade
Sea
Writer
Must

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves.
Gustave Flaubert
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It seems to me... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
Gustave Flaubert
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Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
Gustave Flaubert
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Talent is a long patience.
Gustave Flaubert
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By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
Gustave Flaubert
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I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.
Gustave Flaubert
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Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
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Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.
Gustave Flaubert
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What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
Gustave Flaubert
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I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
Gustave Flaubert
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Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
Gustave Flaubert
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To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
Gustave Flaubert
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Beautiful things spoil nothing.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
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.
Gustave Flaubert