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Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Stupid
Imagination
Makes
Work
Every
False
Morality
Concern

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DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
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DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'
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I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter
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To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
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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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Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
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Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
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Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
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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.
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I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
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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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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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The morality of art is in its very beauty.
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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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Stupidity is something unshakable nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
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The future is the worst thing about the present.
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But an infinity of passions can be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a tiny space.
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