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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
Work
Every
False
Morality
Concern
Stupid
Imagination
Makes

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The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves.
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By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
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The morality of art is in its very beauty.
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Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
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A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
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Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
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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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To be simple is no small matter.
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[The artist] is like a pump he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
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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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Beautiful things spoil nothing.
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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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I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.
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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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