Gourmont Quotes

#1. Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont.

Aldous Huxley

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

Remy De Gourmont

#3. To have a solid foundation of skepticism, -that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.

Remy De Gourmont

#4. Nothing is better for "spiritual advancement" & the detachment of the flesh than a close reading of the "Erotic Dictionary.

Remy De Gourmont

#5. The only excuse a man has for writing is that he express himself, that he reveal to others the kind of world reflected in the mirror of his soul; his only excuse is that he be original.

Remy De Gourmont

#6. Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

Remy De Gourmont

#7. The greater part of a men who speak ill of women are speaking of a certain woman.

Remy De Gourmont

#8. Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

#11. As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.

Remy De Gourmont

#12. Chastity is the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.

Remy De Gourmont

#13. 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.

Remy De Gourmont

#14. To know what everyone knows is to know nothing.

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

#17. 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.

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

#19. 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.

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

#22. 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.

Remy De Gourmont

#23. The woman who loves always smells good.

Remy De Gourmont

#24. Modesty is the delicate form of hypocrisy.

Remy De Gourmont

#25. Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness.

Remy De Gourmont

#26. Try to put well in practice what you already know. In so doing, you will, in good time, discover the hidden things you now inquire about.

Remy De Gourmont

#27. Intelligence is perhaps but a malady, -a beautiful malady; the oysters's pearl.

Remy De Gourmont

#28. Man is the inventor of stupidity.

Remy De Gourmont

#29. Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank.

Remy De Gourmont

#30. 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.

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

#33. How many contradictions! Eh! If I loaded my wagon all on the same side, I'd tumble it over.

Remy De Gourmont

#34. 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.

Remy De Gourmont

#35. 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.

Remy De Gourmont

#36. Man is an animal that "arrived"; that is all.

Remy De Gourmont

#37. Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary.
He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops through the trapdoor another puppet is in readiness to take his place.

Remy De Gourmont

#38. 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.

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

#41. It was an accident that has endowed man with intelligence. He has made use of it: he invented stupidity.

Remy De Gourmont

#42. 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.

Remy De Gourmont

#43. Those men who live with the greatest intensity are often the ones who seem to take least interest in life.

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

#45. Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live.

Remy De Gourmont

#46. To ameliorate & raise the standard of the workingmen to the bourgeois level, is perhaps to create a race of slaves content with their lot,-a cast of comfortable Pariahs.

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

#48. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble

Remy De Gourmont

#49. Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,
and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,
and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

#51. The little girl expects no declaration of tenderness from her doll. She loves it, & that's all. It is thus that we should love.

Remy De Gourmont

#52. 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.

Remy De Gourmont

#53. Man has made use of his intelligence, he invented stupidity.

Remy De Gourmont

#54. Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

Remy De Gourmont

#55. Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.

Remy De Gourmont

#56. Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.

Remy De Gourmont

#57. 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?

Remy De Gourmont

#58. An imbecile is never bored: he contemplates himself.

Remy De Gourmont

#59. 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.

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

#61. The man of genius may dwell unknown, but one always may recognize the path he has followed into the forest. It was a giant who passed that way. The branches are broken at a height that other men cannot reach.

Remy De Gourmont

#62. Art is the accomplice of love.

Remy De Gourmont

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

Remy De Gourmont

#64. To be a member of such a crowd ... is not much to be far removed from solitude; the freedom of everyone is assured by the freedom to which everyone else lays claim.

Remy De Gourmont