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What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Beauty
Beautiful
Impossible

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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L'Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.
Gustave Flaubert
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Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
Gustave Flaubert
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There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
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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As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.
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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It seems to me... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
Gustave Flaubert
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Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
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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Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.
Gustave Flaubert
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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
Gustave Flaubert
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One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
Gustave Flaubert
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By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
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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Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
Gustave Flaubert
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I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
Gustave Flaubert
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Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Gustave Flaubert