Quotes from Joris-Karl Huysmans

The waves of human mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whose dams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity the Christian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict of life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by the consoling beacons of ancient faith.

But it's all too late...my virility's gone and marriage is impossible. My life has certainly been a failure. The best thing I can do,' sighed M. Folantin, 'is to go to bed and sleep.' And as he turned back the sheets and arranged his pillows, his soul offered up a thanksgiving in celebration of the tranquilising benefits of an obliging bed.

He found he was now incapable of understanding a single word of the volumes he consulted; his very eyes stopped reading, and it seemed as if his mind, gorged with literature and art, refused to absorb any more.

Now God refused to come down to earth in the form of potato-flour; that was an undeniable, indisputable fact.

Now it was all over. Once it had done its job, the plebs had been bled white in the interests of public hygiene, while the jovial bourgeois lorded it over the country, putting his trust in the power of his money and the contagiousness of his stupidity.

If only I had a passion of some kind; if I loved women, or my work; if I liked coffee, dominoes or cards, I could eat out,' he thought, 'because I'd never spend long enough at home. But alas, nothing amuses me, nothing interests me; and what's more my stomach is wrecked!'

Persons of good sense are necessarily dull, because they revolve over and over again the tedious topics of everyday life.

Vraiment, quand j'y songe, la littérature n'a qu'une raison d'être, sauver celui qui la fait du dégoût de vivre!

Neither the next day, nor the day after that, did M. Folantin's unhappiness dissipate; he simply let himself drift, incapable of resisting this crushing feeling of depression. Mechanically, under a rainy sky, he would make his way to his office; then he would leave it, eat, and go to bed at nine, only to resume the following day the exact same routine; little by little he slid into complete spiritual apathy.

Such an inveterate stupidity, such a scorn for literature and art, such a hatred for all the ideas he worshipped, were implanted and anchored in these merchant minds, exclusively preoccupied with the business of swindling and money-making, and accessible only to ideas of politics--that base distraction of mediocrities--that he returned enraged to his home and locked himself in with his books.

He desired a troubled indecision on which he might brood until he could shape it at will to a more vague or determinate form, according to the momentary state of his soul.

et, en effet, si le plus bel air du monde devient vulgaire, insupportable, dès que le public le fredonne, dès que les orgues s'en emparent, l'œuvre d'art qui ne demeure pas indifférente aux faux artistes, qui n'est point contestée par les sots, qui ne se contente pas de susciter l'enthousiasme de quelques-uns, devient, elle aussi, par cela même, pour les initiés, polluée, banale, presque repoussante.

In fact, when the period in which a man of talent is obliged to live is dull and stupid, the artist, though unconsciously, is haunted by a nostalgia of some past century.

In his opinion, it was possible to appease certain desires reputed to be the most difficult to satisfy under normal conditions – and that, what's more, by a subtle subterfuge, by an approximate simulation of the object of those very desires.

The fact is that ,pain being one of the consequences of education,in that it grows greater and sharper with the growth of ideas ,it follows that the more we try to polish the minds and refine the nervous system of the under-privileged , the more we shall be developing in their hearts the atrociously active germs of hatred and moral suffering.

Elle devenait en quelque sorte, la déité symbolique de l'indestructible Luxure, la déesse de l'immortelle Hystérie, la beauté maudite, élue entre toutes par la catalepsie qui lui raidit les chairs et lui durcit les muscles; la Bête monstrueuse, indifférente, irresponsable, insensible, empoisonnant, de même que l'Hélène antique, tout ce qui l'approche, tout ce qui la voit, tout ce qu'elle touche.

Wahrhaftig, in solchen Zeiten wie diesen sind die Gärtner die einzigen, die echten Künstler.

Ainsi comprise, elle appartenait aux théogonies de l''Extrême-Orient; elle ne relevait plus des traditions bibliques, ne pouvait même plus être assimilé à la vivante image de Babylone, à la royale Prostituée de l'Apocalypse, accoutrée, comme elle, de joyaux et de pourpre, fardée comme elle ; car celle-là n'était pas jetée par une puissance fatidique, par une force suprême, dans les attirantes abjections de la débauche.

The bourgeoisie, reassured, strutted about in good humor, thanks to its wealth and the contagion of its stupidity. The result of its accession to power had been the destruction of all intelligence, the negation of all honesty, the death of all art, and, in fact, the debased artists had fallen on their knees, and they eagerly kissed the dirty feet of the eminent jobbers and low satraps whose alms permitted them to live.

No, she wanted me to beg her to do what she wanted to do. Like all women, she wanted me to offer her what she desired. I have been rolled.

Als er den letzten Schluck getrunken hatte, ging er in sein Kabinett zurück und ließ sich von dem Diener die Schildkröte nachtragen, die sich partout nicht bewegen wollte

What madness to beget children!

While a hidden orchestra played funeral marches, the guests were waited on by naked negresses wearing only slippers and stockings in cloth of silver embroidered with tears.

since it needs a singularly large dose of goodwill to believe that the governing classes are respectable and that the lower classes are worthy of assistance or compassion, it seems to me,' des Esseintes concluded, 'to be neither ridiculous nor insane to ask of my fellow man a sum total of illusion barely equal to that which he spends each day on his idiotic purposes,