Quote

[The artist] is like a pump he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Artist
Pipe
Inspirational
Reaches
Entrails
Great
Sunlight
Jets
Things
Layers
Pump
Like
Deepest
Pumps
Brings
Jet
Inside
Unnoticed
Lying
Sucks

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.
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One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
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Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.
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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
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Iced champagne was served, and the feel of the cold wine in her mouth gave Emma a shiver that ran over her from head to toe.
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Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
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Mediocrity cherishes rules as for me, I hate them I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.
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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
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The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!
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As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.
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To be simple is no small matter.
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There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.
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When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women
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Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
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I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
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Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
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We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!
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Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
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