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
Seem
Rise
Elevates
Gives
Ideals
Madame
Moving
Sea
Expanse
Doesn
Ocean
Boundless
Seems
Sight
Freely
Soul
Infinite
Moves
Giving
Asked
Ideal
Mind
Thoughts
Presence
Bovary

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My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.
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And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
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I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
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Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.
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I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. I've never sought it (though I desire it) and seek it less and less.
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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.
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Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
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Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
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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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To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
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The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
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We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.
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And he beholds the moon like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
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Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.
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For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
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What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.
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