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We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Beautiful
Swung
Depression
Illness
Suicide
Madness

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.
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Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
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In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
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(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.
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What an elder sees sitting the young can't see standing.
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
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Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
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I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.
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But an infinity of passions can be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a tiny space.
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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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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
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I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
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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.
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Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
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The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
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One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
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As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.
Gustave Flaubert