"One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes."
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Quote collection
Gustave Flaubert quotes (page 5 of 15)
299 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded."
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"You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything"
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"I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is."
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"You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful."
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"Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in."
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"It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt."
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"I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world"
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"Casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands."
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"I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key."
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"I live absolutely like an oyster."
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"Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times."
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"Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory."
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"My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real."
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"How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis."
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"Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery."
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"Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments."
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"One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels."
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"By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself."
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"The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft."
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