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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.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
World
Avoiding
Horrible
Bear
Bears
Living
Art
Done
Life

More quotes by 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.
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A thing derided is a thing dead a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
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By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
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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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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 idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.
Gustave Flaubert
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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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It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
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May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!
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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
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… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!
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What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
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A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
Gustave Flaubert
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To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.)
Gustave Flaubert
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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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She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.
Gustave Flaubert
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Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
Gustave Flaubert
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There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert