"I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none"
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Self-deprecation is Flaubert's stealth weapon here: he flatters "good sense" with one hand while confessing, with a wink, that he doesn't possess it. The line lands because it refuses the usual moral posture of praising reason from a position of mastery. Instead, it makes admiration sound like hunger. "Above all" isn't a calm preference; it's a craving for an internal discipline he suspects he's missing, or has to manufacture through craft.
The subtext is less about stupidity than about temperament. Flaubert was famously allergic to bourgeois platitudes and the cozy certainties of "common sense" as ideology. Yet he also believed in an almost brutal literary exactitude: the right word, the right rhythm, the sentence as an instrument tuned until it hurts. The joke, then, cuts both ways. "Good sense" is what society claims to have in abundance; Flaubert claims not to, which is also a way of refusing society's definition of it. He can love "good sense" precisely because he doesn't mean the complacent version. He means lucidity, proportion, restraint - the hard-won clarity that doesn't come naturally to a mind drawn to excess, irony, or obsession.
Contextually, it reads like a private note turned into a public attitude: the 19th-century novelist staging himself as both unreliable and rigorously controlled. It's a compact manifesto for modern authorship: distrust your instincts, then turn that distrust into style.
The subtext is less about stupidity than about temperament. Flaubert was famously allergic to bourgeois platitudes and the cozy certainties of "common sense" as ideology. Yet he also believed in an almost brutal literary exactitude: the right word, the right rhythm, the sentence as an instrument tuned until it hurts. The joke, then, cuts both ways. "Good sense" is what society claims to have in abundance; Flaubert claims not to, which is also a way of refusing society's definition of it. He can love "good sense" precisely because he doesn't mean the complacent version. He means lucidity, proportion, restraint - the hard-won clarity that doesn't come naturally to a mind drawn to excess, irony, or obsession.
Contextually, it reads like a private note turned into a public attitude: the 19th-century novelist staging himself as both unreliable and rigorously controlled. It's a compact manifesto for modern authorship: distrust your instincts, then turn that distrust into style.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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