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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Aloft
Principal
Keep
Soul
Thing
World

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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The morality of art is in its very beauty.
Gustave Flaubert
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Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
Gustave Flaubert
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
Gustave Flaubert
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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
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. I've never sought it (though I desire it) and seek it less and less.
Gustave Flaubert
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There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
Gustave Flaubert
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The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves.
Gustave Flaubert
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One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
Gustave Flaubert
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(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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What an elder sees sitting the young can't see standing.
Gustave Flaubert
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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!
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
Gustave Flaubert
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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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