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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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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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Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
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Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?
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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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Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.
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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!
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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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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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To be simple is no small matter.
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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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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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But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.
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I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.
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Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
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What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
Gustave Flaubert
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Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
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I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.
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Iced champagne was served, and the feel of the cold wine in her mouth gave Emma a shiver that ran over her from head to toe.
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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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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
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