Remy-de-Gourmont Quotes
Enjoy the top 44 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Remy-de-Gourmont.

“It is undefinable; and moreover, if it were defined it would lose all its value. God is not all that exists; God is all that does not exist. Therein resides the power & the charm of that mysterious word. God is tradition, God is legend, God is folklore, God is a fairy-tale, God is romance, God is a lie, God is a bell, God is a church window, God is religion, God is all that is absurd, useless, invisible, intangible, all that is nothingness & that symbolizes nothingness. God is the nihil in tenebris-(nothing in the darkness) -men have made of him light, life & love.”
— Remy-de-Gourmont —
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
“The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.”
— Remy-de-Gourmont
“Art is the accomplice of love.”
— Remy-de-Gourmont
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
— Remy-de-Gourmont
“Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.”
— Remy-de-Gourmont
— Remy-de-Gourmont
“Chastity is the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.”
— Remy-de-Gourmont
“A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble”
— Remy-de-Gourmont
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— Remy-de-Gourmont
“Intelligence is perhaps but a malady, -a beautiful malady; the oysters's pearl.”
— 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
An imbecile is never bored: he contemplates himself.
— Remy-de-Gourmont
— Remy-de-Gourmont
— Remy-de-Gourmont
Ah! I wish I had the courage to work for the debasement of my contemporaries. What good work it would be to defile their daughters: to insinuate something obscene into the infantile hands which caress each paternal beard and cheek; to poison them, even at the risk of perishing ourselves; to do as those Spanish monks did, who drank death in order that they might persuade the French rabble which had violated their monastery to do likewise.
— Remy-de-Gourmont
“Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank.”
— Remy-de-Gourmont
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
Well, suppose we remain upon earth, after all? Suppose we bravely accept the death of our dreams at the same time as the death of our bodies? This beyond is decidedly uncertain, quite vague and mobile. I do not believe that it exists everywhere; I believe that it is nowhere except in our infantile imaginations. Born with us, it will end at the same moment that we do, to be born anew in our posterity. The beyond is the earthly tomorrow, as we bequeath it to our heirs and as they modify it by their efforts and in accordance with their tastes.
— Remy-de-Gourmont
— Remy-de-Gourmont
Nothing is better for "spiritual advancement" & the detachment of the flesh than a close reading of the "Erotic Dictionary.
— Remy-de-Gourmont
“The greater part of a men who speak ill of women are speaking of a certain woman.”
— Remy-de-Gourmont
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
“Man is an animal that "arrived"; that is all.”
— Remy-de-Gourmont
“Modesty is the delicate form of hypocrisy.”
— Remy-de-Gourmont
How many contradictions! Eh! If I loaded my wagon all on the same side, I'd tumble it over.
— Remy-de-Gourmont
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