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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
Form
Value
Occupies
Certain
Least
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Always
Almost
Hierarchy
Moral
Lowest
Games
Literary
Values
Require
Comes
Criticism
Inventiveness
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Rhyming

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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Talent is a long patience.
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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
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We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
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There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
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COLD. Healthier than heat.
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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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Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.
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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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To be simple is no small matter.
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Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
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Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
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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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Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.
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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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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.
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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
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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 is a consequence and must not be a goal.
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What an elder sees sitting the young can't see standing.
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