Top 58 Quotes & Sayings by Remy de Gourmont

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

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.

Man is the inventor of stupidity.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The woman who loves always smells good.

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

Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

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

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

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.

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

To know what everyone knows is to know nothing.

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?

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

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

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.

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

Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.

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

Modesty is the delicate form of hypocrisy.

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.

An imbecile is never bored: he contemplates himself.

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

Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.

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

Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Intelligence, that sublimation of the sensibility, that organ of the need to know, is sterilized sensibility.

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.

Art is the accomplice of love.

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

A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble

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.

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

Art includes everything which stimulates the desire to live; science includes everything which sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the most disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.