Remy de Gourmont Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.