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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
Avoid
Atheism
Close
Rest
Art
Nothing
Way
Count
Unhappy

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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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But an infinity of passions can be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a tiny space.
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COLD. Healthier than heat.
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It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
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[The artist] is like a pump he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
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What an elder sees sitting the young can't see standing.
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Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
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And he beholds the moon like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
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The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
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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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I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
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Everything is there: the love of Art.
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Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.
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The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
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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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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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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
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He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.
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As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.
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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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