Remy de Gourmont Quotes (25 Quotes)

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

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

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

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.

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.

Before undergoing a surgical operation arrange your temporal affairs -- you may live.

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

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

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

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

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.

Man is the inventor of stupidity.

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

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.

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.

Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live.

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.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

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

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.

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

Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty to curse life....

The woman who loves always smells good.

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.

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