Gustave Flaubert Quotes About Literature
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I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
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I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.
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There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces.
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Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
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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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I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
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It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
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Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
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Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
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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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Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
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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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Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
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The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
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Madame Bovary is myself.
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The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
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One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
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The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.
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In her enthusiasms she had always looked for something tangible: she had always loved church for its flowers, music for its romantic words, literature for its power to stir the passions and she rebelled before the mysteries of faith just as she grew ever more restive under discipline, which was antipathetic to her nature.
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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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The style, which is something I take to heart, is getting on my nerves horribly. It frustrates and torments me. I have days when Iam sick about it and nights when it gives me a fever. The more I go at it the more I find myself incapable of conveying the Idea.
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
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And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
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Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
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Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.
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A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
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