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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
Life
Navel
Wade
Sea
Writer
Must
Writing

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
Gustave Flaubert
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The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
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I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
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I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
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One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
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Doesn't it seem to you, asked Madame Bovary, that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?
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A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
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Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
Gustave Flaubert
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You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.
Gustave Flaubert
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The morality of art is in its very beauty.
Gustave Flaubert
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
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Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
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A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
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Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter
Gustave Flaubert
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By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.
Gustave Flaubert
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A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
Gustave Flaubert
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Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
Gustave Flaubert