Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Remy de Gourmont (French Poet, Writer)

Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915,) fully Remy-Marie-Charles de Gourmont, was a novelist, poet, playwright, and philosopher. The most astute French critic and essayist from 1900 to World War I, he was one of the most-penetrating contemporary critics of the French Symbolist movement.

Born in Bazoches-au-Houlme, Normandy, Gourmont studied law at Caen University. He was discharged from his post at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, because of an allegedly pro-German article in Mercure de France, which he co-founded. After that, he suffered from a painful skin disease and lived the life of a recluse. He edited a Symbolist art magazine L’Ymagier (1895–96.)

Gourmont’s creative output—poetry and novels that disseminated the Symbolist aesthetic doctrines—is cerebral and stylistic, betraying a ‘fin de siecle’ focus with words as sound more than sense. However, his evaluative work, which includes Le Livre des masque (1896–98) and Promenades philosophiques (1905–09,) is clear-sighted and individualistic, revealing scholarship and intellectual curiosity.

Gourmont is also known for his Lettres à l’Amazone (1914; Letters to the Amazon,) correspondence with the American-born Parisian salonist Natalie Clifford Barney. Gourmont’s novels include Sixtine (1890; Very Woman) and Un Cœur Virginal (1907; translated by Aldous Huxley as A Virgin Heart, 1921.) His approach to literature later influenced the 20th-century poets Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Remy de Gourmont

Man has made use of his intelligence, he invented stupidity.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Intelligence

Man associates ideas not according to logic or verifiable exactitude, but according to his pleasure and interests. It is for this reason that most truths are nothing but prejudices.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Prejudice

The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
—Remy de Gourmont

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.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Existence

If the secret of being a bore is to tell all, the secret of pleasing is to say just enough to be—not understood, but divined.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Understanding

We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility is surrendering to intelligence.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Education

Man is the inventor of stupidity.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Stupidity

The ever-present phenomenon ceases to exist for our senses. It was a city dweller, or a prisoner, or a blind man suddenly given his sight, who first noted natural beauty.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Beauty

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.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Science, Scientists

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Critics, Criticism, Effort

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
Topics: Perception

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.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Justice

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Ideas, Simplicity

Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Women, Men & Women, Men

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.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Industry

Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.
—Remy de Gourmont
Topics: Individuality

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