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A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
Gustave Flaubert
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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
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Flaubert
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More quotes by Gustave Flaubert
Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
Gustave Flaubert
Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
Gustave Flaubert
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.
Gustave Flaubert
A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Gustave Flaubert
What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
Gustave Flaubert
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
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
To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
Gustave Flaubert
One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
Gustave Flaubert
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
The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
Gustave Flaubert
He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height
Gustave Flaubert
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Gustave Flaubert
Years passed and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.
Gustave Flaubert
May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!
Gustave Flaubert
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
Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.
Gustave Flaubert
One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
Gustave Flaubert
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
Gustave Flaubert
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
Gustave Flaubert
