Top 50 Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

2. “The only really indecent people are the chaste.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

3. “In the matter of animals I love only cats, but I love them unreasonably for their qualities and in spite of their numerous faults. I have only one, but I could not live without a cat.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

4. “Such an inveterate stupidity, such a scorn for literature and art, such a hatred for all the ideas he worshipped, were implanted and anchored in these merchant minds, exclusively preoccupied with the business of swindling and money-making, and accessible only to ideas of politics – that base distraction of mediocrities – that he returned enraged to his home and locked himself in with his books.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

5. “Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

6. “Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

7. “The only people who are worth knowing are either saints, scoundrels or madmen; at least their conversation is always interesting. Sensible people are dull by definition, because they are always harping on to the same boring tune about everyday life. They form part of the crowd, the more intelligent part perhaps, but the crowd for all that, and I’m sick of them.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

8. “Art is the only clean thing on earth, except holiness.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

9. “After the aristocracy of birth had come the aristocracy of money.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

10. “Go forth more boldly, look at things more widely, pray as best you can, and do not trouble yourself.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

11. “The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

12. “At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterous deceptions, he had said not a word of these childish maladies, but had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

13. “There’s no doubt about it – gardeners are the only true artists these days.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

14. “Only the chaste are truly obscene.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

15. “How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

16. “Menacing lines of black tomorrows on the horizon.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

17. “I seek new perfumes, ampler blossoms, untried pleasures.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

18. “The waves of human mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whose dams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity the Christian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict of life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by the consoling beacons of ancient faith.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

19. “Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

20. “He realized at last that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

21. “Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

22. “It was still quite motionless and he felt it with his fingers; it was dead. Accustomed, no doubt, to an uneventful existence, to a humble life spent beneath its poor carapace, it had not been able to bear the dazzling splendor thrust upon it, the glittering cope in which it had been garbed, the gems with which its back had been encrusted, like a ciborium.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

23. “Now it was all over. Once it had done its job, the plebs had been bled white in the interests of public hygiene, while the jovial bourgeois lorded it over the country, putting his trust in the power of his money and the contagiousness of his stupidity.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

24. “He did not believe, and yet he admitted the supernatural. Right here on earth how could any of us deny that we are hemmed in by mystery, in our homes, in the street, – everywhere when we came to think of it?”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

25. “If Baudelaire, in hieroglyphics of the soul, had deciphered the return of the age of the sentiment and ideas, Poe, in the field of morbid psychology had more especially investigated the domain of the soul.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

26. “It was here that she was indeed Woman, for here she gave rein to her ardent and cruel temperament. She was living, more refined and savage, more execrable and exquisite. She more energetically awakened the dulled senses of man, more surely bewitched and subdued his power of will, with the charm of a tall venereal flower, on sacrilegious beds, in impious hothouses.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

27. “Neither the next day, nor the day after that, did M. Folantin’s unhappiness dissipate; he simply let himself drift, incapable of resisting this crushing feeling of depression. Mechanically, under a rainy sky, he would make his way to his office; then he would leave it, eat, and go to bed at nine, only to resume the following day the exact same routine; little by little he slid into complete spiritual apathy.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

28. “He found he was now incapable of understanding a single word of the volumes he consulted; his very eyes stopped reading, and it seemed as if his mind, gorged with literature and art, refused to absorb any more.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

29. “He wanted, in short, a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion, the causes of which he would strive to patiently and even vainly to analyse.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

30. “Curious, a man’s affection for the object that he manipulates.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

31. “Daydream is the only good thing in life. Everything else is vulgar and empty.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

32. “The soul is pained by all things it thinks upon.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

33. “Persons of good sense are necessarily dull, because they revolve over and over again the tedious topics of everyday life.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

34. “Last but not least, he hated with all the hatred that was in him the rising generation, the appalling boors who find it necessary to talk and laugh at the top of their voices in restaurants and cafes, who jostle you in the street without a word of apology, and who, without expressing or even indicating regret, drive the wheels of a baby-carriage into your legs.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

35. “The loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

36. “There are two ways of ridding ourselves of a thing which burdens us, casting it away or letting it fall. To cast away requires an effort of which we may not be capable, to let fall imposes no labour, is simpler, without peril, within reach of all. To cast away, again, implies a certain interest, a certain animation, even a certain fear; to let fall is absolute indifference, absolute contempt; believe me, use this method, and Satan will flee.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

37. “And then he experienced an inexplicable confusion of thoughts, like a rosary of ideas comprised of diverse and ingenious beads that had unraveled and was now rattling around in his brain with no thread linking them, no coherence.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

38. “Now God refused to come down to earth in the form of potato-flour; that was an undeniable, indisputable fact.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

39. “His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with any author or scholar.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

40. “While a hidden orchestra played funeral marches, the guests were waited on by naked negresses wearing only slippers and stockings in cloth of silver embroidered with tears.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

41. “At bottom, one might say that human wisdom consisted in the protraction of all things, in saying “no” before saying “yes,” for one could manage people only by trifling with them.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

42. “It’s foolish to let my thoughts wander this way,” he said, drawing himself up, “but daydream is the only good thing in life. Everything else is vulgar and empty.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

43. “Baudelaire had gone further; he had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

44. “This imbecile sentimentality, combined with a ferociously practical sense, represented the dominant motive of the age.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

45. “In fact, when the period in which a man of talent is obliged to live is dull and stupid, the artist, though unconsciously, is haunted by a nostalgia of some past century.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

46. “If Baudelaire had made out among the hieroglyphics of the soul the critical age of thought and feeling, it was Poe who, in the sphere of morbid psychology, had carried out the closest scrutiny of the will.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

47. “Ah, when one has not the gift of rendering one’s grief superbly and transforming it into literary or musical passages which weep magnificently, the best thing is to keep still about it.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

48. “In his opinion, it was possible to appease certain desires reputed to be the most difficult to satisfy under normal conditions – and that, what’s more, by a subtle subterfuge, by an approximate simulation of the object of those very desires.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

49. “Amid the solitude in which he lived, without new nourishment, without any fresh experiences, without any renovation of thought, without that exchange of sensations common to society, in this unnatural confinement in which he persisted, all the questionings forgotten during his stay in Paris were revived as active irritants.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

50. “He had revealed the morbid psychology of the mind which has attained the October of its sensations, recounted the symptoms of souls summoned by grief and licensed by spleen, and shown the increasing decay of impressions while the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth are enfeebled and the only thing remaining is the arid memories of miseries borne, intolerances endured and affronts suffered by intelligences oppressed by a ridiculous destiny.”

— Joris-Karl Huysmans