Remy de Gourmont
We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility is surrendering to intelligence.Collection: 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.Collection: Good
Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last.Collection: Relationship
Man has made use of his intelligence, he invented stupidity.Collection: Intelligence
Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.
Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
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.
Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.
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.
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.
Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.
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.
The woman who loves always smells good.
Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live.
Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction.
Thinking is hard work. One can't bear burdens and ideas at the same time.
Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness.
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 consciousnessCollection: Different
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.Collection: Life
Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.Collection: Dog
Thinking is hard work. One can't bear burdens and ideas at the same timeCollection: Hard Work
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.Collection: Tangled
Man begins by loving love and ends by loving a woman. Woman begins by loving a man and ends by loving love.Collection: Men
Art is the accomplice of love.Collection: Art
To know what everyone knows is to know nothing.Collection: Knows
Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Life
Man has made use of his intelligence; he invented stupidity.Collection: Stupid
God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.Collection: Doe
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.Collection: Art
Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstractionCollection: Two
The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.Collection: Silence
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?Collection: Memories
Knowledge has its end in itself, apart from any idea of life and propagation of the species.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Beauty
Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free.Collection: Liberty
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.Collection: Favors
Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to liveCollection: Art
For two thousand years Christianity has been telling us: life is death, death is life; it is high time to consult the dictionary.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Ocean
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?Collection: Mean
Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Beauty
Modesty is the delicate form of hypocrisy.Collection: Hypocrisy
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.Collection: Wine
Intelligence, that sublimation of the sensibility, that organ of the need to know, is sterilized sensibility.Collection: Needs
Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.Collection: Book