"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe."
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Quote collection
Gustave Flaubert quotes (page 3 of 15)
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"Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth."
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"One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us."
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"It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating."
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"The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded."
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"A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss."
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"A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man."
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"Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!"
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"Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless."
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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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"Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings."
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"You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes."
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"God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world"
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"Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution."
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"How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act."
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"Success is a consequence and must not be a goal."
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"Exuberance is better than taste."
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"Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful."
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"What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures."
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"Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry."
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