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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
Touch
Hands
Gilding
Idols
Remain

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Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.
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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.
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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.
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What an elder sees sitting the young can't see standing.
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Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
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Beautiful things spoil nothing.
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Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
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Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
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Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
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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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Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.
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Everything is there: the love of Art.
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Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!
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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
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How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
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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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There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.
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