"On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters."
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Gustave Flaubert quotes (page 7 of 15)
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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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"For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb."
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"Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work."
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"Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation."
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"[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."
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"Talent is long patience."
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"The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him."
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"My God, this novel makes me break out in a cold sweat! Do you know how much I've written in five months, since the end of August? Sixty-five pages! Each paragraph is good in itself and there are some pages that are perfect. I feel certain. But just because of this, it isn't getting on. It's a series of well-turned, ordered paragraphs which do not flow on from each other. I shall have to unscrew them, loosen the joints, as one does with the masts of a ship when one wants the sail to take more wind."
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"The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft."
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"The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet."
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"Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough."
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"The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers."
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"(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust."
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"Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal."
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"Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it."
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"She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery."
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"Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it."
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"The public wants work which flatters its illusions."
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"You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it."
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