Quotes from 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.

The roses of old time have filled the well. Is it there that you have been hiding, my sweet love?

Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank.

Nothing is better for "spiritual advancement" & the detachment of the flesh than a close reading of the "Erotic Dictionary.

The greater part of a men who speak ill of women are speaking of a certain woman.

Modesty is the delicate form of hypocrisy.

How many contradictions! Eh! If I loaded my wagon all on the same side, I'd tumble it over.

Ah! I wish I had the courage to work for the debasement of my contemporaries. What good work it would be to defile their daughters: to insinuate something obscene into the infantile hands which caress each paternal beard and cheek; to poison them, even at the risk of perishing ourselves; to do as those Spanish monks did, who drank death in order that they might persuade the French rabble which had violated their monastery to do likewise.

Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.

It is a communion at once mystic & real, in the guise of metal. Money which is liberty, is also fecundation. It is the universal sperm without which human societies would remain but barren wombs. Paganism, which knew & understood everything, opens to a shower of gold from on high the conquered thighs of Danae. That is what we should see on our coins, instead of a meaningless head, if we were capable of contemplating without embarrassment that religious tableau.

Intelligence, that sublimation of the sensibility, that organ of the need to know, is sterilized sensibility.

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.

Knowledge has its end in itself, apart from any idea of life and propagation of the species.

Nothing exists except by virtue of a disequilibrium, an injustice. All existence is a theft paid for by other existences; no life flowers except on a cemetery.

Art is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life.

Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.

Man begins by loving love and ends by loving a woman. Woman begins by loving a man and ends by loving love.

Art is the accomplice of love.

Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.

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.

Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction

The woman who loves always smells good.