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You can't find the soul with a scalpel.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Scalpel
Scalpels
Soul
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More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.
Gustave Flaubert
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It seems to me... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
Gustave Flaubert
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. I've never sought it (though I desire it) and seek it less and less.
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Talent is a long patience.
Gustave Flaubert
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I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
Gustave Flaubert
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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
Gustave Flaubert
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What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
Gustave Flaubert
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And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.
Gustave Flaubert
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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Gustave Flaubert
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The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves.
Gustave Flaubert
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He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height
Gustave Flaubert
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I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.
Gustave Flaubert
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On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
Gustave Flaubert
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As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
Gustave Flaubert
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I have patience in all things - as far as the antechamber.
Gustave Flaubert
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We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!
Gustave Flaubert
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After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert