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We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Gilding
Idols
Remain
Touch
Hands

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!
Gustave Flaubert
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What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
Gustave Flaubert
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Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.
Gustave Flaubert
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Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
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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My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.
Gustave Flaubert
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I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.
Gustave Flaubert
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You can't find the soul with a scalpel.
Gustave Flaubert
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Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.
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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I have patience in all things - as far as the antechamber.
Gustave Flaubert
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And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.
Gustave Flaubert
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Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
Gustave Flaubert
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I have dreamed much and have done very little.
Gustave Flaubert
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Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.
Gustave Flaubert
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He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height
Gustave Flaubert
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After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
Gustave Flaubert
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I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.
Gustave Flaubert
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How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
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.
Gustave Flaubert