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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
Hands
Gilding
Idols
Remain
Touch

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Mediocrity cherishes rules as for me, I hate them I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.
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The morality of art is in its very beauty.
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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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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
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To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
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It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
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I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
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Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
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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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One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
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Beautiful things spoil nothing.
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One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
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Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.
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L'Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.
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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!
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
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
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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