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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Persons
Ignorance
Person
Ordinary
Better
Century
Causes
Ungrateful
Times
Slander
Lives
King
History
Gratitude
Today
Kings

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Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.
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What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
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What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
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What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
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[The artist] is like a pump he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
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The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
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After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.
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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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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.
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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
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I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
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The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
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I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
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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.
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As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.
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I have patience in all things - as far as the antechamber.
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I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.
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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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