Remy de Gourmont Quotes - Page 2

Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free.

The woman who loves always smells good.

It is well-nigh obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinities with murderers than those who oppose it.

Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live

For two thousand years Christianity has been telling us: life is death, death is life; it is high time to consult the dictionary.

And there is neither beginning nor end, nor past nor future; there is only a present, at the same time static and ephemeral, multiple and absolute. It is the vital ocean in which we all share, according to our strength, our needs or our desires.

Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.

Extraordinarily excessive sensuality it may be .. but it all comes down to the same thing in the end, and one means is surely as good as another, since the end obtained is always the same. In any case the exceptional, endlessly repeated, is no different than the banal; and unceasing recapitulation can add nothing, in the end, to the sum of experience. I am weary and hopeless three times the dupe. Why have you trained me in the shame of abominable sins?

Man is the inventor of stupidity.

We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility is surrendering to intelligence.

The ever-present phenomenon ceases to exist for our senses. It was a city dweller, or a prisoner, or a blind man suddenly given his sight, who first noted natural beauty.

Modesty is the delicate form of hypocrisy.

Intelligence, that sublimation of the sensibility, that organ of the need to know, is sterilized sensibility.

Man, in spite of his tendency towards mendacity, has a great respect for what he calls the truth. Truth is his staff in his voyage through life; commonplaces are the bread in his bag and the wine in his jug.

In order to understand life it is not only necessary not to be indifferent to men, but not to be indifferent to flocks, to trees. One should be indifferent to nothing.

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

Art is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life.

Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad.

Cliche refers to words, commonplace to ideas. Cliche describes the form or the letter, commonplace the substance or spirit. To confuse them is to confuse the thought with the expression of the thought. The cliche is immediately perceivable; the commonplace very often escapes notice if decked out in original dress. There are few examples, in any literature, of new ideas expressed in original form. The most critical mind must often be content with one or the other of these pleasures, only too happy when it is not deprived of both at once, which is not too rarely the case.

If the secret of being a bore is to tell all, the secret of pleasing is to say just enough to be -not understood, but divined.

A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble

Most men who rail against women are railing at one woman only.

An imbecile is never bored: he contemplates himself.

Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.