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Rémy de Gourmont Quotes | Quotes said by Rémy de Gourmont

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #1

    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.


  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #2

    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.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #3

    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.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #4

    As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #5

    Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #6

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

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #7

    Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary.
    He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops through the trapdoor another puppet is in readiness to take his place.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #8

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

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #9

    Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #10

    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?

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #11

    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.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #12

    How many contradictions! Eh! If I loaded my wagon all on the same side, I'd tumble it over.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #13

    Intelligence is perhaps but a malady, -a beautiful malady; the oysters's pearl.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #14

    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.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #15

    It is a communion at once mystic & real, in the guise of metal.

    Money which is liberty, is also fecundation. It is the universal sperm without which human societies would remain but barren wombs. Paganism, which knew & understood everything, opens to a shower of gold from on high the conquered thighs of Danae. That is what we should see on our coins, instead of a meaningless head, if we were capable of contemplating without embarrassment that religious tableau.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #16

    It is not perhaps a question of truthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the lips of others; even when the ingenuously write into little secret diaries, women think of the unknown god reading--perhaps--over their shoulders. With a similar nature, a woman, to be placed in the first ranks of men, would require even higher genius than that of the highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous works of men themselves, the finest works of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced them.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #17

    It was an accident that has endowed man with intelligence. He has made use of it: he invented stupidity.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #18

    Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #19

    Man is an animal that arrived; that is all.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #20

    Nothing is better for spiritual advancement & the detachment of the flesh than a close reading of the Erotic Dictionary.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #21

    Nothing returns, nothing begins anew; it is never the same thing, and yet it seems always the same. For, if the days never return, every moment brings forth new beings whose destiny it will be to create for themselves, in the course of their lives, the same illusions that have companioned and at times illuminated ours. The fabric is eternal; eternal, the embroidery. A universe dies when we die; another is born when a new creature comes to earth with a new sensibility. If, then, it is very true that nothing begins all over again, it is very just to say, too, that everything continues. One may fearlessly advance the latter statement or the former, according to whether one considers the individual or the blending of generations. From this second point of view, everything is coexistent; the same cause produces contradictory, yet logical effects. All the colors and their shades are printed at a single impression, to form the wonderful image we call life.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #22

    Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #23

    The greater part of a men who speak ill of women are speaking of a certain woman.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #24

    The little girl expects no declaration of tenderness from her doll. She loves it, & that's all. It is thus that we should love.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #25

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

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #26

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

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #27

    The vainglory of wishing to understand is dangerous, immoral and, above all, old-fashioned. The modern way – perhaps the final way - is to say: Go forward, without knowing why, as quickly as possible, towards an unknown goal! To act and think are opposites which identify one only in the Absolute. To accomplish all one's movements – of the head, the arms, the legs – without ever quite attaining the status of a puppet, but with a certainty that gives one a feeling of rightness: that is what is nowadays held up as the ideal. Be citizens of Universal activity! Forget to be conscious of ourselves! The blind horse gallops without hesitation, not knowing where it is going, not caring where it has been: so let up put out our eyes!

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #28

    To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,--while society fraternity is based on resemblances.
    The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul, -and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which Andre Gide belongs.
    The misfortune of these beings, when they express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar & almost understood, as parchments are seen & read above sealed cases.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #29

    To be a member of such a crowd ... is not much to be far removed from solitude; the freedom of everyone is assured by the freedom to which everyone else lays claim.

  • Rémy de Gourmont Quote #30

    To have a solid foundation of skepticism, -that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.

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