Remy de Gourmont famous quotes

Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Different #Consciousness #Life Is

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.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Tangled #Mind #Perception

Art is the accomplice of love.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Art #Art Is #Accomplices

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

#Men #Ideas #Prejudice

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

#Liberty #Wealth #Curse

Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Art #Art Is #Accomplices

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

#Men #Ends #Men Women

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.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Life #Lying #Thinking

Man has made use of his intelligence; he invented stupidity.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Men #Intelligent #Stupidity

Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Sweet #Nature #Autumn

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

#War #Humanity #Favors

Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Art #Desire

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.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Expression #Ideas #Mind

Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Drinking #Aberration #Peculiar

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

#Beauty #Men #Cities

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

#Favors #Death Penalty #Penalties

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

#Wisdom #Years #Two

Man is the inventor of stupidity.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Men #Stupidity #Invention

Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Funny Love #Kissing #Men

Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live; science, everything that sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the most disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Art #Knowledge #Desire

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

#Men #Order #Tree

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

#Life #Flower #Injustice

God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Doe

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

#Mean #Lust #Add

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

#Wine #Men #Bags

Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Art #Born #Turns

An imbecile is never bored: he contemplates himself.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Bored #Imbeciles #Contemplating

Art is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Art #Flower #Giving

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

#Beauty #Art #Expression

Intelligence, that sublimation of the sensibility, that organ of the need to know, is sterilized sensibility.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Needs #Intellect #Organs

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

#Knowledge #Ideas #Ends

We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility is surrendering to intelligence.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Education #Sensibility

Most men who rail against women are railing at one woman only.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Relationship #Men #Rail

Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Dog #Demon

The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Silence #Pleasure #Scoundrels

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

#Understanding #Secret #Enough

Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Men #Individuality #Needs

Modesty is the delicate form of hypocrisy.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Hypocrisy #Modesty #Form

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

#Ocean #Past #Desire

The woman who loves always smells good.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Smell

A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Definitions #Flour

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

#Hard Work #Thinking #Ideas

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

#Two #Facts #Elements

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Lying #Educational #Simple

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

#Simple #Language #Poet

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

#Wisdom #Truth #Quests