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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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DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
Gustave Flaubert
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But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.
Gustave Flaubert
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One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
Gustave Flaubert
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How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
Gustave Flaubert
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The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
Gustave Flaubert
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
Gustave Flaubert
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Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
Gustave Flaubert
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What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
Gustave Flaubert
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As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
Gustave Flaubert
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Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
Gustave Flaubert
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
Gustave Flaubert
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COLD. Healthier than heat.
Gustave Flaubert
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After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.
Gustave Flaubert
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Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
Gustave Flaubert
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Mediocrity cherishes rules as for me, I hate them I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.
Gustave Flaubert
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I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
Gustave Flaubert
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One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
Gustave Flaubert
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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
Gustave Flaubert