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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

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(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.
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There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
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Everything is there: the love of Art.
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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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I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
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The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.
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Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
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You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.
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Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
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But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.
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Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
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Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.
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The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
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On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
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But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.
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By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.
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La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.
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And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
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We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.
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One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
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