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To be simple is no small matter.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Small
Simple
Matter

More quotes by 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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Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.
Gustave Flaubert
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… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!
Gustave Flaubert
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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?
Gustave Flaubert
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Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
Gustave Flaubert
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And he beholds the moon like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
Gustave Flaubert
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Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
Gustave Flaubert
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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
Gustave Flaubert
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A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
Gustave Flaubert
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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Gustave Flaubert
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We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself!
Gustave Flaubert
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As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.
Gustave Flaubert
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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
Gustave Flaubert
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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
Gustave Flaubert
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Reveal art conceal the artist.
Gustave Flaubert
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La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert
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One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
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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The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
Gustave Flaubert
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The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
Gustave Flaubert