Reality does not conform to ...

Reality does not conform to the ideal but confirms it.
Reality does not conform to the ideal but confirms it.
 Gustave Flaubert

More phrases

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.
The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Quotes from the same author

There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
 Gustave Flaubert
Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
 Gustave Flaubert
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
 Gustave Flaubert
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.
 Gustave Flaubert
Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.
 Gustave Flaubert