Remy de Gourmont Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

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.

Remy de Gourmont
Art…is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life.

Remy de Gourmont
All poetry is an affair of the body, that is, to be real, it must affect the body.

Remy de Gourmont
The decisive gestures in life are almost always the simplest, the most ingenuous.

Remy de Gourmont
Women are complex, of course not more so than men, but in a different way that men cannot understand.

Remy de Gourmont
Sex is an absinthe whose strength only the strong can stand. In both sexes there are two successive crises, the sexual and the sensual. The first comes at a fixed period … the second generally coincides with the completion of growth. Sometimes, when decline is beginning, a third occurs, which like the first brings with it a condition of sentimentality.

Remy de Gourmont
Art must break the chains, all rules and formulas.

Remy de Gourmont
Time does not live for them, they (girls) live in the absolute. A curious creature. But then all women are curious creatures, girls above all.

Remy de Gourmont
We write as we feel, as we think, with our entire body.

Remy de Gourmont
And there is neither beginning nor end, nor past nor future; there is only a present, at the same time static and ephemeral, multiple and absolute. It is the vital ocean in which we all share, according to our strength, our needs or our desires.

Remy de Gourmont
The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.

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
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.

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

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
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
Women feel and it suffices to steer them satisfactorily through life as well as to solve problems which leave men utterly helpless. It is only through feelings one can get in contact with them. There is but one way of understanding women and that is to love them.

Remy de Gourmont
But morality triumphs. And when morality triumphs, very bad things happen.

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
Civilized man's brain is a museum of contradictory truths.

Remy de Gourmont
It happens in life, as in grammar, that the exceptions outnumber the rules.

Remy de Gourmont
Innocence has its instincts, its needs, its physiological dues.

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.

Remy de Gourmont
Women don't understand themselves and what is more they do not care about understanding.

Remy de Gourmont