Remy de Gourmont Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“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 -
“Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius.”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“Man has made use of his intelligence; he invented stupidity.”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“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 -
“Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“Cliche refers to words, commonplace to ideas. Cliche describes the form or the letter, commonplace the substance or spirit. To confuse them is to confuse the thought with the expression of the thought. The cliche is immediately perceivable; the commonplace very often escapes notice if decked out in original dress. There are few examples, in any literature, of new ideas expressed in original form. The most critical mind must often be content with one or the other of these pleasures, only too happy when it is not deprived of both at once, which is not too rarely the case.”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last.”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“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?”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“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 -
“Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“An imbecile is never bored: he contemplates himself.”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“Art is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life.”
-- Remy de Gourmont -
“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 -
“Intelligence, that sublimation of the sensibility, that organ of the need to know, is sterilized sensibility.”
-- Remy de Gourmont
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