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A thing derided is a thing dead a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Suffering
Thing
Men
Derided
Laughter
Stronger
Laughing
Dead

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The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
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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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Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
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Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?
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Beautiful things spoil nothing.
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May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!
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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.
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Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
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The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
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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.
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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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One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
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He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.
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Everything is there: the love of Art.
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Years passed and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.
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There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
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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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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
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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!
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But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.
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