Remy De Gourmont Quotes

Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness

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

Art is the accomplice of love.

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

A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble

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.

Thinking is hard work. One can't bear burdens and ideas at the same time

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

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.

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.

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

Man has made use of his intelligence; he invented stupidity.

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

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.

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

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

Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live

Man is the inventor of stupidity.

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

Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad.

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.

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.

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

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

Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction

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

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

The woman who loves always smells good.

Modesty is the delicate form of hypocrisy.

To know what everyone knows is to know nothing.

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

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

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

An imbecile is never bored: he contemplates himself.

God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.

It is fairly obvious that those who are in favour of the death penalty have more affinity with assassins than those who are not.

Man has made use of his intelligence, he invented stupidity.

Most men who run down women are running down one woman only.