Remy de Gourmont > Quotes

“Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.”
― Remy de Gourmont

“Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.”
― Remy de Gourmont

“Art is the accomplice of love.”
― Remy de Gourmont

“The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.”
― Remy de Gourmont, The Angels of Perversity

“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, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.”
― Remy de Gourmont

“Chastity is the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“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, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him. ”
― Remy De Gourmont

“Those men who live with the greatest intensity are often the ones who seem to take least interest in life.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,--while society fraternity is based on resemblances.
The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul, -and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which Andre Gide belongs.
The misfortune of these beings, when they express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar & almost understood, as parchments are seen & read above sealed cases.”
― Remy de Gourmont, The Book of Masks

“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?”
― Remy de Gourmont, The Angels of Perversity

“Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble”
― Remy de Gourmont

“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, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“It was an accident that has endowed man with intelligence. He has made use of it: he invented stupidity.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Intelligence is perhaps but a malady, -a beautiful malady; the oysters's pearl.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“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, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“It appears, from all this, that our eyes are uncertain. Two persons look at the same clock and there is a difference of two or three minutes in their reading of the time. One has a tendency to put back the hands, the other to advance them. Let us not too confidently try to play the part of the third person who wishes to set the first two aright; it may well happen that we are mistaken in turn. Besides, in our daily life, we have less need of certainty than of a certain approximation to certainty. Let us learn how to see, but without looking too closely at things and men: they look better from a distance.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“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

“She lit the candelabras which stood on the mantelpiece. Placed at the head of the bead, on a side-table, they looked like two burning bushes, their flames solemn and inextinguishable. But beneath that avalanche of light the dead man became hideous: the pale head displayed a whiteness more livid than the bedsheet, ghastly against the cambric of the pillow; pits of shadow were hollowed out under the eyes and his nose was villainously elongated, and even the mouth seemed wicked – his mouth, which was so very gentle!
”
― Remy de Gourmont, The Angels of Perversity

“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, The Book of Masks

“He was a young man of savage & unexpected originality, a diseased genius & quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane & in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form & not the quality of intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume & all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe.”
― Remy de Gourmont, The Book of Masks

“Мъжете, които се изказват лошо за жените, обикновен имат предвид само една жена." Реми дьо Гурмон”
― Remy de Gourmont

“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, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“The vainglory of wishing to understand is dangerous, immoral and, above all, old-fashioned. The modern way – perhaps the final way - is to say: Go forward, without knowing why, as quickly as possible, towards an unknown goal! To act and think are opposites which identify one only in the Absolute. To accomplish all one's movements – of the head, the arms, the legs – without ever quite attaining the status of a puppet, but with a certainty that gives one a feeling of rightness: that is what is nowadays held up as the ideal. Be citizens of Universal activity! Forget to be conscious of ourselves! The blind horse gallops without hesitation, not knowing where it is going, not caring where it has been: so let up put out our eyes!”
― Remy de Gourmont

“Abstractions do us much harm by impelling us to the quest of the absolute in all things. Joy does not exist, but there are joys: and these joys may not be folly felt unless they are detached from neutral or even painful conditions. The idea of continuity is almost self-negating. Nature makes no leaps; but life makes only bounds. It is measured by our heartbeats & these may be counted. That there should be, amid the number of deep pulsations that scan the line of our existence, some grievous ones, does not permit the affirmation that life is therefore evil. Moreover, neither a continuous joy would be perceived by consciousness.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“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.”
― Rémy de Gourmont

“The snow kept on falling, and penetrated so deeply into her prone body that she had no other feeling than that of wanting to die, buried under these adorable snow kisses, to be embalmed in the snow - and then to be swept off, in a final gust, to the land of eternal snow, to the fabled infinite mountains where the darling little adultresses lie in a perpetual swoon, ceaselessly and firmly caressed by all the perverse angels.”
― Remy de Gourmont, The Angels of Perversity