Top 39 Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes
#1. Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God ... It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#3. That moment of grace mentioned by Lacordaire, when the last shaft of light penetrates the soul and unites the truths there lying dispersed.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#5. He realized at last that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#6. Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#7. Outside, the rain was still falling steadily; he could hear it pattering on the glass skylight at the far end of the room and cascading into the water-spouts. Inside, no one stirred; all were dozing like himself over their liqueur glasses, pleasantly conscious that they were in the dry.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#8. If Baudelaire, in hieroglyphics of the soul, had deciphered the return of the age of the sentiment and ideas, Poe, in the field of morbid psychology had more especially investigated the domain of the soul.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#9. Go forth more boldly, look at things more widely, pray as best you can, and do not trouble yourself.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#10. Now it was all over. Once it had done its job, the plebs had been bled white in the interests of public hygiene, while the jovial bourgeois lorded it over the country, putting his trust in the power of his money and the contagiousness of his stupidity.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#11. The heart, said to be man's noblest organ, has the same shape as the penis, commonly supposed the most ignoble; the symbolism is not inappropriate, because the love which comes from the heart soon extends to the organ which it resembles.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#13. And then he experienced an inexplicable confusion of thoughts, like a rosary of ideas comprised of diverse and ingenious beads that had unraveled and was now rattling around in his brain with no thread linking them, no coherence.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#14. There's no doubt about it - gardeners are the only true artists these days.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#17. He cared little for commonly experienced emotions, for everyday associations of ideas, now that the closing of his mind had grown more pronounced, and he allowed access only to the most highly refined sensations, to crises of faith and to violent disorders of the senses.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#18. And yet the point of view from which his ideas on art had sprung was a simple one: for him, literary schools did not exist; the only thing that mattered was the temperament of the artist; the only thing of interest was the way his brain worked, regardless of the subject he was treating.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#19. He found he was now incapable of understanding a single word of the volumes he consulted; his very eyes stopped reading, and it seemed as if his mind, gorged with literature and art, refused to absorb any more.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#20. Now God refused to come down to earth in the form of potato-flour; that was an undeniable, indisputable fact.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#22. I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove ... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#23. Life is an unpleasant business. I have resolved to spend it reflecting on it.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#24. In the matter of animals I love only cats, but I love them unreasonably for their qualities and in spite of their numerous faults. I have only one, but I could not live without a cat.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#26. Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay, and whoever does not settle it here below, defrays it after death; happiness is only lent, and must be repaid; its very phantoms are like duties paid in advance on a future succession of sorrows.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#28. What I want to do is to teach a lesson to all these people ... I want [to prove] that the Devil exists, that the Devil reigns supreme, that the power he enjoyed in the Middle Ages has not been taken from him, for today he is the absolute master of the world.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#29. How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#30. He did not believe, and yet he admitted the supernatural. Right here on earth how could any of us deny that we are hemmed in by mystery, in our homes, in the street, - everywhere when we came to think of it?
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#31. Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#33. The loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#34. Daydream is the only good thing in life. Everything else is vulgar and empty.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#35. ... he noticed that the free thinkers, the doctrinaires of the bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they might stifle the opinions of others, were greedy and shameless puritans whom, in education, he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#36. But that which remains for ever incomprehensible is the initial horror, the horror imposed on each of us, of having to live, and that is a mystery no philosophy can explain.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#38. Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things. It was possible, in his opinion, to gratify the most extravagant, absurd desires by a subtle subterfuge, by a slight modification of the object of one's wishes.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#39. Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
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