Quotes from Remy de Gourmont

Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.

Je montrerai comment ce peu de bruit inérieur qui n'est rien, contient tout, [...] comment un cerveau isolé du monde peut se créer un monde.

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.

When acts have become instinctive, they have become invincible.

Men or tigers, sphex or carabs are under the same necessity; to kill or to die, or to shed blood or eat grass. But to eat grass, is not much better than suicide: ask the lambkins.

Sincerity is barely an explanation: it is never an excuse.

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

Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.

Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.

Art is the accomplice of love.

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

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

The little girl expects no declaration of tenderness from her doll. She loves it, & that's all. It is thus that we should love.

Chastity is the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.

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

The man of genius may dwell unknown, but one always may recognize the path he has followed into the forest. It was a giant who passed that way. The branches are broken at a height that other men cannot reach.

Those men who live with the greatest intensity are often the ones who seem to take least interest in life.

Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.

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?

A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble

As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.

It was an accident that has endowed man with intelligence. He has made use of it: he invented stupidity.

The only excuse a man has for writing is that he express himself, that he reveal to others the kind of world reflected in the mirror of his soul; his only excuse is that he be original.

To be a member of such a crowd ... is not much to be far removed from solitude; the freedom of everyone is assured by the freedom to which everyone else lays claim.