Quotes by Rémy De Gourmont
Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live.
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.
Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction.
Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness.
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.
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.
Thinking is hard work. One can't bear burdens and ideas at the same time.
The woman who loves always smells good.
Try to put well in practice what you already know. In so doing, you will, in good time, discover the hidden things you now inquire about.
Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.
Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.
Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last.
Man is the inventor of stupidity.
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.
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.
Man has made use of his intelligence, he invented stupidity.
Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds
We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility is surrendering to intelligence.
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.
Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.
