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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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I have patience in all things - as far as the antechamber.
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She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.
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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
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The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
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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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As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.
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Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
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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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Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.
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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
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By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.
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What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
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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
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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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One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
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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.
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I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
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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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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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