Top 40 Remy de Gourmont Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Remy de Gourmont

2. “Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.”

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

4. “Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.”

— Remy de Gourmont

5. “To know what everyone knows is to know nothing.”

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

9. “Thinking is hard work. One can’t bear burdens and ideas at the same time.”

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

11. “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.”

— Remy de Gourmont

12. “A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.”

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

15. “Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.”

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

17. “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.”

— Remy de Gourmont

18. “An imbecile is never bored: he contemplates himself.”

— Remy de Gourmont

19. “Modesty is the delicate form of hypocrisy.”

— Remy de Gourmont

20. “Two elements are needed to form a truth – a fact and an abstraction.”

— Remy de Gourmont

21. “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.”

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

25. “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.”

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

27. “The woman who loves always smells good.”

— Remy de Gourmont

28. “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.”

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

30. “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.”

— Remy de Gourmont

31. “Art is the accomplice of love.”

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

34. “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.”

— Remy de Gourmont

35. “Intelligence is perhaps but a malady, -a beautiful malady; the oysters’s pearl.”

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

38. “The man of genius may dwell unknown, but one always may recognize the path he has followed into the forest. It was a giant who passed that way. The branches are broken at a height that other men cannot reach.”

— Remy de Gourmont

39. “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.”

— Remy de Gourmont

40. “The roses of old time have filled the well. Is it there that you have been hiding, my sweet love?”

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

42. “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.”

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont

44. “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.”

— Remy de Gourmont

45. “Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live.”

— Remy de Gourmont

46. “God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.”

— Remy de Gourmont

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

— Remy de Gourmont