Quote

Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Book
Resemblance
Must
Stir
Like
Distinct
Forest
Forests
Sentences
Leaves
Despite

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.
Gustave Flaubert
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Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?
Gustave Flaubert
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Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
Gustave Flaubert
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Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Gustave Flaubert
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The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
Gustave Flaubert
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Talent is a long patience.
Gustave Flaubert
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May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!
Gustave Flaubert
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(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.
Gustave Flaubert
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DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'
Gustave Flaubert
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To be simple is no small matter.
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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I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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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.
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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As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.
Gustave Flaubert
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Beautiful things spoil nothing.
Gustave Flaubert
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We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!
Gustave Flaubert
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The future is the worst thing about the present.
Gustave Flaubert