Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.

Joris-Karl Huysmans
Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.

Joris-Karl Huysmans
He shrunk more and more from the realities of life and above all from the society of his day which he regarded with an ever growing horror,—a detestation which had reacted strongly on his literary and artistic tastes; he refused, as far as possible, to have anything to do with pictures and books whose subjects were in any way connected with modern existence.

Joris-Karl Huysmans
Last comes the class of persons, of nervous organization and enfeebled vigour, whose sensual appetite craves highly seasoned dishes, men of a hectic, over-stimulated constitution. Their eyes almost invariably hanker after that most irritating and morbid of colours, with its artificial splendours and feverish acrid gleams,-orange.

Joris-Karl Huysmans
The loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own.

Joris-Karl Huysmans
Far from seeking to justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: 'If a God has made this world, I should not wish to be that God. The world's wretchedness would rend my heart.

Joris-Karl Huysmans
Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.

Joris-Karl Huysmans
He realized at last that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him

Joris-Karl Huysmans
Art is the only clean thing on earth, except holiness.

Joris-Karl Huysmans
Ah; but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! —Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illumined no longer by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope.

Joris-Karl Huysmans