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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
Elder
Elders
Sees
Standing
Sitting
Young

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
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The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
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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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Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.
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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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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
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You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.
Gustave Flaubert
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I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.
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Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
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You can't find the soul with a scalpel.
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The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.
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On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
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Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
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Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
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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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I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
Gustave Flaubert
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Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
Gustave Flaubert
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
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We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!
Gustave Flaubert