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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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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Moral
Lowest
Games
Literary
Values
Require
Comes
Criticism
Inventiveness
Place
Regard
Rhyming
Form
Value
Occupies
Certain
Least
Regards
Always
Almost
Hierarchy

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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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Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
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The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
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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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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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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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I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
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The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
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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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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
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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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What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
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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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It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
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A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
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Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.
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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.
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Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
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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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