Philosophic Nights in Paris Quotes

“The little girl expects no declaration of tenderness from her doll. She loves it, & that's all. It is thus that we should love.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Chastity is the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Those men who live with the greatest intensity are often the ones who seem to take least interest in life.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“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.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“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.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“It was an accident that has endowed man with intelligence. He has made use of it: he invented stupidity.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Intelligence is perhaps but a malady, -a beautiful malady; the oysters's pearl.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“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.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“It appears, from all this, that our eyes are uncertain. Two persons look at the same clock and there is a difference of two or three minutes in their reading of the time. One has a tendency to put back the hands, the other to advance them. Let us not too confidently try to play the part of the third person who wishes to set the first two aright; it may well happen that we are mistaken in turn. Besides, in our daily life, we have less need of certainty than of a certain approximation to certainty. Let us learn how to see, but without looking too closely at things and men: they look better from a distance.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“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.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Abstractions do us much harm by impelling us to the quest of the absolute in all things. Joy does not exist, but there are joys: and these joys may not be folly felt unless they are detached from neutral or even painful conditions. The idea of continuity is almost self-negating. Nature makes no leaps; but life makes only bounds. It is measured by our heartbeats & these may be counted. That there should be, amid the number of deep pulsations that scan the line of our existence, some grievous ones, does not permit the affirmation that life is therefore evil. Moreover, neither a continuous joy would be perceived by consciousness.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Nothing returns, nothing begins anew; it is never the same thing, and yet it seems always the same. For, if the days never return, every moment brings forth new beings whose destiny it will be to create for themselves, in the course of their lives, the same illusions that have companioned and at times illuminated ours. The fabric is eternal; eternal, the embroidery. A universe dies when we die; another is born when a new creature comes to earth with a new sensibility. If, then, it is very true that nothing begins all over again, it is very just to say, too, that everything continues. One may fearlessly advance the latter statement or the former, according to whether one considers the individual or the blending of generations. From this second point of view, everything is coexistent; the same cause produces contradictory, yet logical effects. All the colors and their shades are printed at a single impression, to form the wonderful image we call life.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Intelligence is perhaps but a malady,-a beautiful malady; the oyster's pearl.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“It is undefinable; and moreover, if it were defined it would lose all its value. God is not all that exists; God is all that does not exist. Therein resides the power & the charm of that mysterious word. God is tradition, God is legend, God is folklore, God is a fairy-tale, God is romance, God is a lie, God is a bell, God is a church window, God is religion, God is all that is absurd, useless, invisible, intangible, all that is nothingness & that symbolizes nothingness. God is the nihil in tenebris-(nothing in the darkness) -men have made of him light, life & love.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“An imbecile is never bored: he contemplates himself.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“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.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“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.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Man is an animal that "arrived"; that is all.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“How many contradictions! Eh! If I loaded my wagon all on the same side, I'd tumble it over.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Modesty is the delicate form of hypocrisy.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“The greater part of a men who speak ill of women are speaking of a certain woman.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Nothing is better for "spiritual advancement" & the detachment of the flesh than a close reading of the "Erotic Dictionary.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Each one, then, should love his life, even though it be not very attractive, for it is the only life. It is a boon that will never return and that each person should tend and enjoy with care; it is one's capital, large or small, and can not be treated as an investment like those whose dividends are payable through eternity. Life is an annuity; nothing is more certain than that. So that all efforts are to be respected that tend to ameliorate the tenure of this perishable possession which, at the end of every day, has already lost a little of its value. Eternity, the bait by which simple folk are still lured, is not situated beyond life, but in life itself, and is divided among all men, all creatures. Each of us holds but a small portion of it, but that share is so precious that it suffices to enrich the poorest. Let us then take the bitter and the sweet in confidence, and when the fall of the days seems to whirl about us, let us remember that dusk is also dawn.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“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.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“Well, suppose we remain upon earth, after all? Suppose we bravely accept the death of our dreams at the same time as the death of our bodies? This beyond is decidedly uncertain, quite vague and mobile. I do not believe that it exists everywhere; I believe that it is nowhere except in our infantile imaginations. Born with us, it will end at the same moment that we do, to be born anew in our posterity. The beyond is the earthly tomorrow, as we bequeath it to our heirs and as they modify it by their efforts and in accordance with their tastes.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris