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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?

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?

Approximate author period: c. 1850 AD · industrial

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Attribution & collection notes
Author or tradition
Gustave Flaubert
Attribution: attributed
Country attributed
Not established
A country attribution does not establish the earliest origin.
Historical period
Approximate author period: c. 1850 AD · industrial
Approximate author-period anchor from life dates 1821 to 1880; Wikidata Q43444, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q43444 (accessed 2026-10-08). Not a quotation composition date.
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken.
Recorded source
Contributor-provided quotation collection

Supplied reference C; CSV row 40641; supplied attribution, independently unverified

A collection's publication date can be later than the words it records.