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"Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn't that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?"
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Exlpore more Independence quotes

"I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love."

"I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do."

"Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.Childhood is a wilderness."

"True respect comes when we fend for ourselves without the aid of anyone, and when we owned something and say, 'this is my own'! Not necessarily as a way of boasting of our abundance and grace, but having a feeling that we can use it without obstruction, or being asked to return the favor."

"Because if it is to spite her,' Biddy pursued, 'I should think -but you know best- that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think -but you know best- she was not worth gaining over."

"A desire and a goal not to be subservient to another or to be in charge of one's life is a good thing to do."

"What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!"

"For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom."

"The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has-from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness."
Explore more quotes by Gustave Flaubert

"Leon was weary of loving without any result; moreover he was beginning to feel that depression caused by the repetition of the same kind of life, when no interest inspires and no hope sustains it. He was so bored with Yonville and its inhabitants, that the sight of certain persons, of certain houses, irritated him beyond endurance; and the chemist, good fellow though he was, was becoming absolutely unbearable to him. Yet the prospect of a new condition of life frightened as much as it seduced him."

"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 morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow."

"It's hard to communicate anything exactly and that's why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find."

"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."

"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."

"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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