Remy de Gourmont Quotes

Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness

Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.

Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.

Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius.

Thinking is hard work. One can't bear burdens and ideas at the same time

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

Man begins by loving love and ends by loving a woman. Woman begins by loving a man and ends by loving love.

Art is the accomplice of love.

Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.

To know what everyone knows is to know nothing.

Man associates ideas not according to logic or verifiable exactitude, but according to his pleasure and interests. It is for this reason that most truths are nothing but prejudices.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.

Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last.

Nothing exists except by virtue of a disequilibrium, an injustice. All existence is a theft paid for by other existences; no life flowers except on a cemetery.

Man has made use of his intelligence; he invented stupidity.

God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.

Art includes everything which stimulates the desire to live; science includes everything which sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the most disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life.

Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction

Industry has operated against the artisan in favor of the idler, and also in favor of capital and against labor. Any mechanical invention whatsoever has been more harmful to humanity than a century of war.

Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.

To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes-countrysides and figures, movements and gestures-how could he have a style, that is originality?

Since art is the expression of beauty and beauty can be understood only in the form of the material elements of the true idea it contains, art has become almost uniquely feminine. Beauty is woman, and also art is woman.

The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.

Knowledge has its end in itself, apart from any idea of life and propagation of the species.