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What an elder sees sitting the young can't see standing.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Young
Elder
Elders
Sees
Standing
Sitting

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
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To be simple is no small matter.
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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.
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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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Years passed and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
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You can't find the soul with a scalpel.
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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
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DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
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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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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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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
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Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.
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L'Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
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He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
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