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The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
Gustave Flaubert
Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.
Gustave Flaubert
The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
Gustave Flaubert
I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.
Gustave Flaubert
I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
Gustave Flaubert
Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
Gustave Flaubert
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Gustave Flaubert
Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.
Gustave Flaubert
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
Gustave Flaubert
There is no truth. There is only perception.
Gustave Flaubert
I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
Gustave Flaubert
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
Gustave Flaubert
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
Gustave Flaubert
Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
Gustave Flaubert
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.
Gustave Flaubert
The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
Gustave Flaubert
But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.
Gustave Flaubert
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.
Gustave Flaubert
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.
Gustave Flaubert
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.
Gustave Flaubert
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
Gustave Flaubert
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.
Gustave Flaubert
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.
Gustave Flaubert
The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
Gustave Flaubert
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
Gustave Flaubert
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
Gustave Flaubert
The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
Gustave Flaubert
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.
Gustave Flaubert
Read in order to live.
Gustave Flaubert
Exuberance is better than taste.
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary is myself.
Gustave Flaubert
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Gustave Flaubert
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Gustave Flaubert
One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
Gustave Flaubert
One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
Gustave Flaubert
The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.
Gustave Flaubert
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
Gustave Flaubert
The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
Gustave Flaubert
A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Gustave Flaubert
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
Gustave Flaubert
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
Gustave Flaubert
One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
Gustave Flaubert
Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.
Gustave Flaubert
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
Gustave Flaubert