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Axiom: hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom. But I include in the word bourgeois, the bourgeois in blouses as well the bourgeois in coats. It is we and we alone, that is to say the literary men, who are the people, or to say it better: the tradition of humanity.

— Gustave Flaubert

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More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Sentimental Education (1869)

One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gustave Flaubert (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.