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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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Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
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Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
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One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
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(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.
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I have dreamed much and have done very little.
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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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You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.
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For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
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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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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
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The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
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And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.
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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
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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.
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Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.
Gustave Flaubert
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
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Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
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