Remy de Gourmont

Who was Remy de Gourmont?

Remy de Gourmont was a French Symbolist poet, novelist, and influential critic. He was widely read in his era, and an important influence on Blaise Cendrars.

Famous Quotes:

• Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Man is the inventor of stupidity.
• Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.
• 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.
• The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.
• Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last.
• Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.