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The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Art
Nothing
Way
Count
Unhappy
Avoid
Atheism
Close
Rest

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.
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Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
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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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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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DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'
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Reveal art conceal the artist.
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Mediocrity cherishes rules as for me, I hate them I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.
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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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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
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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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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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What an elder sees sitting the young can't see standing.
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For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Gustave Flaubert
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La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.
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And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
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The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves.
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I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
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Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
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The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!
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