"The future is the worst thing about the present."
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Gustave Flaubert quotes (page 6 of 15)
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"What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible."
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"The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence."
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"By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream"
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"As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back."
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"There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni."
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"The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens."
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"You can't find the soul with a scalpel."
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"Of all lies, art is the least untrue."
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"After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again."
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"Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase."
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"One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!"
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"Talent is nothing but long patience."
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"The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect."
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"What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment."
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"Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions."
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"The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."
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"It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts."
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"Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves."
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"There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things."
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