Quote

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?

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Moving
Sea
Expanse
Doesn
Ocean
Boundless
Seems
Sight
Freely
Soul
Infinite
Moves
Giving
Asked
Ideal
Mind
Thoughts
Presence
Bovary
Seem
Rise
Elevates
Gives
Ideals
Madame

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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
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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?
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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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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
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The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
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What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.
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Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.
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Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
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DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
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There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.
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He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height
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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.'
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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 one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
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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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And he beholds the moon like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
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COLD. Healthier than heat.
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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.
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The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.
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