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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
Close
Rest
Art
Nothing
Way
Count
Unhappy
Avoid
Atheism

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.
Gustave Flaubert
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Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
Gustave Flaubert
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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
Gustave Flaubert
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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!
Gustave Flaubert
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The future is the worst thing about the present.
Gustave Flaubert
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I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter
Gustave Flaubert
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
Gustave Flaubert
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The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
Gustave Flaubert
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Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
Gustave Flaubert
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And he beholds the moon like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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COLD. Healthier than heat.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
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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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Gustave Flaubert
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Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.
Gustave Flaubert
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Doesn't it seem to you, asked Madame Bovary, that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?
Gustave Flaubert
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On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
Gustave Flaubert
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For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
Gustave Flaubert