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04dde88
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Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
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reading
books
life
inspirational
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Gustave Flaubert |
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3c370b9
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Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.
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work
life
inspirational
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Gustave Flaubert |
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286b6c4
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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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language
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Gustave Flaubert |
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12bb464
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At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each ..
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hope
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Gustave Flaubert |
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431f832
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Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.
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winter
rain
sadness
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Gustave Flaubert |
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73c3bda
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She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.
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Gustave Flaubert |
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eea716e
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Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers." "
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gilding
disillusionment
idols
touch
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Gustave Flaubert |
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5c086c8
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It's hard to communicate anything exactly and that's why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
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relationships
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Gustave Flaubert |
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d2186d6
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Doubt ... is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
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madness
knowledge
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Gustave Flaubert |
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4d61558
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What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?
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reading
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Gustave Flaubert |
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ee63f20
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Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
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Gustave Flaubert |
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ab13700
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An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
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time
passion
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Gustave Flaubert |
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9c1dd8c
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You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.
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literature
reading
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Gustave Flaubert |
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7fe339d
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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.
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travel
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Gustave Flaubert |
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4884849
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Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul's possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level
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individuality
mediocrity
soul
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Gustave Flaubert |
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ae0be16
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One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
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Gustave Flaubert |
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81ba73a
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I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something - the eternal 'what's the use?' - sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.
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perseverance
depression
despair
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Gustave Flaubert |
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5165ad9
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Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.
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Gustave Flaubert |
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b22023b
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Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon. She had no idea by what wind it would reach her, toward what shore it would bear her, or what kind of craft it would be - tiny boat or towering vessel, laden with heartbreaks or filled to the gunwhales with rapture. ..
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Gustave Flaubert |
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04bbf35
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She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leaned? But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet's heart in an angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! How impossible! Besides,..
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Gustave Flaubert |
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722a5ef
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I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
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words
nature
waves
language
listening
harmony
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Gustave Flaubert |
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4b71ac7
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She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.
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Gustave Flaubert |
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5a4fbeb
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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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future
life
|
Gustave Flaubert |
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f3bc003
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He had the vanity to believe men did not like him - while men simply did not know him.
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vanity
|
Gustave Flaubert |
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eaf8877
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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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love-disappointment
idols
idolatry
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Gustave Flaubert |
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24af076
|
Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?
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Gustave Flaubert |
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a96f91d
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She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague "she" of all the poetry books."
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Gustave Flaubert |
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3ff5220
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I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.
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Gustave Flaubert |
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da2c685
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Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
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money
greed
love
|
Gustave Flaubert |
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c73399a
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He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.
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men
women
love
french
|
Gustave Flaubert |
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9072a63
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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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madame-bovary
|
Gustave Flaubert |
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3170045
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You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
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love
critics
|
Gustave Flaubert |
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01d34c6
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And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
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passion
moment
|
Gustave Flaubert |
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65871e5
|
La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fele ou nous battons des melodies a faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les etoiles.
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Gustave Flaubert |
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d522f62
|
What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!
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stars
poetry
|
Gustave Flaubert |
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b7593d6
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He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been b..
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parenthood
|
Gustave Flaubert |
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c7878a8
|
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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music
madame-bovary
speech
|
Gustave Flaubert |
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8ee2bc4
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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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|
Gustave Flaubert |
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4c8f778
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And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
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Gustave Flaubert |
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9864e69
|
Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?"
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sea
|
Gustave Flaubert |
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ed38666
|
Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom
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|
Gustave Flaubert |
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0d00a68
|
He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.
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sadness
love
indifference
crying
|
Gustave Flaubert |
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30d37ae
|
What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.
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simple
|
Gustave Flaubert |
|
12c0142
|
Everything measurable passes, everything that can be counted has an end. Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.
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love
|
Gustave Flaubert |