Quotes from Remy de Gourmont

To ameliorate & raise the standard of the workingmen to the bourgeois level, is perhaps to create a race of slaves content with their lot,-a cast of comfortable Pariahs.

Intelligence is perhaps but a malady, -a beautiful malady; the oysters's pearl.

He was a young man of savage & unexpected originality, a diseased genius & quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane & in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form & not the quality of intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume & all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe.

Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary. He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops through the trapdoor another puppet is in readiness to take his place.

The snow kept on falling, and penetrated so deeply into her prone body that she had no other feeling than that of wanting to die, buried under these adorable snow kisses, to be embalmed in the snow - and then to be swept off, in a final gust, to the land of eternal snow, to the fabled infinite mountains where the darling little adultresses lie in a perpetual swoon, ceaselessly and firmly caressed by all the perverse angels.

Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free.

God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

Of all sexual aberrations perhaps the most curious is chastity.

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

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

Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad.

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.

Man is a successful animal, that's all.

Man is the inventor of stupidity.

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

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.

Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

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.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

An imbecile is never bored: he contemplates himself.

To have a solid foundation of skepticism, -that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.

Man is an animal that "arrived"; that is all.

Intelligence is perhaps but a malady,-a beautiful malady; the oyster's pearl.