Every man has in him a dominant talent which [...] enriches the community with a new art.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.
To trust in oneself, to become a being of merit and worth, is the best and surest way.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Every man has an inborn gift that allows him to easily accomplish certain acts impossible for any other. Do your work.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and straightforwardness; likewise, nothing is rarer in any man than an act which is his own.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The first secret of success is self-confidence, the conviction that if you are here, it is because the powers of the Universe have put you here with a purpose [...].
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The summary of wisdom is that time given to work is never lost.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
It is the good reader that makes the good book; a solid mind cannot read badly: in every book, it finds passages that seem undoubtedly addressed to it.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The light by which we see in this world comes from the soul of the observer.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
If thought is the form, feeling is the color.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
It is not by our power of penetration that we are strong, but by our power of harmony.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Do not wear yourself out rejecting things, nor crying out against evil, but sing the beauty of the good.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The affirmation of affirmations is love. As much love, so much perception.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Health is the condition of wisdom, and its mark is cheerfulness — an open and noble character.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
To help the young soul, to increase energy, to inspire hope [...] this is not an easy thing, it is the work of divine men.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The inner life [...] loves truth, because it is itself real; it loves the just, it knows nothing else.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The unspeakable foolishness of Censorship [...] has a certain flavor of fearful and bigoted sycophancy, mixed with a bizarre scent of professorial vanity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The cowardice of playwrights, that is [...] the real subject.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Censorship dictates, and the author corrects.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If a work does not bear the mention: 'in collaboration with the Censors,' it can only be out of forgetfulness or ingratitude.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To theories that were too exalted and paradoxical, [...] the author has opposed replies in the form of correctives which attenuate their scope.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The modifications were crucial; they concerned the main situations which had seemed to us to make the play inadmissible.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Often the director becomes an accomplice of the Censors.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The director fully adopted our views, but he was faced with the author's resistance. He went ahead anyway.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The author consents to 'secularize' his character and undertakes to remove from him 'any ecclesiastical character'.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
An author authorizes the Censors to modify themselves everything that had displeased them; they turn it completely upside down and the author approves.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Censorship is more stubborn than a mule; it never gives in.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Censorship] knows that the majority of authors prefer money to dignity, revenue to independence.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If no concession had ever been made to the Censors, their role would have become so odious that certain unpopularity would have swept it away.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
After all, is it so necessary to succeed?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[He was] a worrier and a delicate soul, one of those who place so many conditions on the most moderate happiness that they rarely encounter it and never secure it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Happiness is the opposite of truth, which one always finds as soon as one seeks it; one sometimes encounters it only if one does not think about it [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Society disperses attention, scatters the mind, and seems to enlarge man only to prevent him from belonging to himself.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is by limiting one's being that one possesses it entirely.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
I have found that everything is vain, even glory and pleasure.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If he agrees to let the poetry that ferments in the depths of his heart, too often frozen by reason, overflow, [a writer] is an eternal writer.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is not up to a writer to present himself as he conceives himself to posterity, which takes into account neither intentions nor even wills and accepts only the results.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What man has the right to demand happiness on an earth where almost everyone exhausts themselves merely reducing their miseries?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Whenever a great mind takes life too seriously, [...] it would perhaps be a sign of an even greater mind to dismiss these contradictions with a smile [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What a sickness moralism is when it is not supported by a strong and discreet will [...]!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One should neither misuse pleasure nor abstain from it: neither debauchery nor asceticism.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What power there is in love! It dispels man's sorrows and repairs his life.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Love is] a veil over the void.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In the Middle Ages [...] the people capable of thinking are few in number, but those who do think, do so boldly and without any consideration for common beliefs.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The printing press gave it a renewed influence that lasted until the time of Rabelais, after which there was a marked decline [...] in the manner of expressing it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Nature is like a fountain ever-flowing and ever-full from which all beauty springs. Its bed is immensity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One must contemplate it [Nature], without comparing it to anything, without hoping to understand it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The best way to be happy on earth is to live well and get rich without working. [...] you just have to know how to deceive others and steal with impunity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We preach poverty and we swim in abundance; we preach humility and we build splendid palaces.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
our absolution is not given, it is sold.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
from religion, we take the grain and leave the chaff.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
he never appeals to anything but nature and reason.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Certain poets] are much less entangled than we are in moral subtleties.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Their goal [...] is to show the way, which is to yield delicately to one's passions.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
They are duped neither by the honesty of men nor by the chastity of women and never speak of virtue without a certain smile, which says more than their words.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
religion is entirely external to them, it does not penetrate their souls, which remain free, and it is with a clear-sighted eye that they consider things and men.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is one of the merits of widely-read books that they inform us with certainty about the state of mind of their faithful readers.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Think of leading a good life, let each man go and embrace his sweetheart [...] Love one another loyally and you will never be blamed.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Every man is probably eloquent once in his life.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The punishment of wise men who refuse to take part in government is to live under the government of men who are not their equals.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
An audience is not the mere sum of the individuals who compose it. Their sympathy gives them a certain social feeling that fills all its members...
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Kings are not those who sit on thrones, but those who know how to govern.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Plato defines rhetoric: 'The art of ruling the minds of men.'
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The purpose of eloquence is [...] to change in a couple of hours [...] convictions and habits that go back for years.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
What makes books virtuous is that they are readable, and what makes orators virtuous is that they are interesting.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
True eloquence [...] tears children from their games, the elderly from their armchairs, the sick from their warm rooms.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
A great man is the greatest of events.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
In any society, the individual who knows the facts is like the guide a group of friends hires to climb a mountain.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Concentrate some daily experience into a brilliant symbol, and the listeners are electrified.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The truly eloquent man is a sound man, gifted with the power to communicate his own soundness of mind.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
If you would lift me up, you must be on higher ground. If you would set me free, you must be free.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
There is in [man] a principle of resurrection, the immortality of the idea.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The moment art reaches its perfection is when [...] the speaker sees the eternal scales of truth [...] thereby making great what is great, and small what is small.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
No man is defined by a single word.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Every great mind naturally has its philosophy, but it must not try too hard to systematize it. It escapes the very moment one thinks one holds and has fixed it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Only silence is great; all the rest is weakness.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One needs colors to paint the night and words to praise silence.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In literature, a certain distance is needed to bring out the ridiculous. Up close, it lacks perspective.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The great writer is always in the process of becoming, even or especially after his death. One is never done with him, and his destiny continues through the generations.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] when you think about your style, you always write badly.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A genius is; it cannot be analyzed externally and is knowable only by its results.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Each generation has its infatuations, which remain as mysteries for the next.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is no such thing as a masterpiece created out of thin air. [...] Absolute originality is but a conception of the ignorant.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] what seems absurd only seems so because it is new, and once we get used to it, the absurdity will seem entirely natural and logical.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If literary expression were immutable, it would soon spread such boredom that the world would no longer want to hear of it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One imitates a manner, one does not imitate a nature.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The peril is less moving than the idea of the peril.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The truth is that French literature [...] has only ever been renewed by breaths from the outside.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is only one truth to tell men, whoever they may be: Be yourselves! But how useless it is! [...]
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is no example of a purely national, purely indigenous literature. We have this illusion about Greece, but that is because [...] the Greek one alone has survived.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Novelty is what a literature lives on, and where would it find it, if not outside of itself? One cannot feed on one's own substance.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The artistic sense of the contemporary public? It is synonymous with perfect obedience. I much prefer complete ignorance, the kind that leaves natural sensitivity or insensitivity intact.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He who does not have the style or ideas of everyone else is necessarily the common enemy.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There are two publics: the one on which a journalist can have some influence, and the other, the one that makes serious reputations [...], the one that judges the judges.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The hatred of life [...] and of struggle is making frightful progress. People no longer even desire to enjoy themselves; they desire not to suffer: to bury themselves in a cloister or a 'clearing' [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Can one imagine a Goethe without French culture or a Chateaubriand without English culture? Is there an advantage? No, there is a necessity. Does one ask if there is an advantage to eating? One must.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
All that is new is good, and all that is unknown is new, all that is distant is new. The more a literary work differs from present literary trends, the greater its nutritional value will be.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is up to the public, for anything that does not require the use of force, to police itself. Here it will be a matter of inertia; it will consist of not listening, not looking, not paying.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To belong to humanity is truly to belong, and far too closely, to imbeciles.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A celebration is an escape from the rules. [...] The State, organizing festivities? But the State, by definition, is the party pooper!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The final result of the appeal to moral force will be the absolute reign of brute force.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Verlaine, by the force of a superior idealism, crossed the painful distance in a single bound; or else he created around himself an invisible reality, as in his verses, a visible dream.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The critic who has produced nothing is a coward. [...] A critic is a spiritual director, or nothing at all.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A critic is only right if the public, in advance, agrees with them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Lyrical romanticism as the development of a national seed and not as a foreign import.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Personal lyricism, if it is [...] a depravity of poetry, is, at least in our country, a traditional depravity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
His painting, successful in its details, is incoherent as a whole.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A confused violence disturbs the calm of the night, and the light with the noise dispels the shadow and the silence.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is one of Théophile's charms that he dared to be so personal and so sweet.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The sun, fearing to shine and fearing to withdraw, the stars dared not appear [...], the zephyr dared not pass.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The most beautiful name in the world is the name Marie.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Rhetoric is not what attracts us [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
I approve that everyone should follow nature in all things.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The rule displeases me, I write confusedly: A good mind never does anything but with ease.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[He] was a free spirit, of the lineage of the undisciplined and the unbelievers.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He was a pagan of that admirable paganism which demands that one live one's life, above all.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One is not a secondary mind when one prepares the coming of greater minds than oneself.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[He is] one of those who kept the torch lit. Drops of burning wax fell on his hand; that is why it trembles a little.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is good that foreigners who love French literature know how much we must struggle to get a just idea or a new name into the feverish minds of our compatriots.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
As soon as the steel wedge is removed from the skull, the wound closes; but we will not be discouraged, we will keep hammering until their heads are pulp.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Ten times the reeds have been cut from around the statue, and no one has wished to approach to hear the confidences of the god.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is stupidity, there is ignorance, there is envy, but there is also dishonesty in these outcries against obscurity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Poetry [...] is constantly rejected by base criticism into the harsh light of commonplaces [...]; it is not yet accepted that she prefers the coolness of springs and twilights.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What true poetry is clear — in the sense that Boileau gives to that irritating word?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There are dead men whom one must kill.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Let us not kill the dead who had their hour of glory, for that glory was never without some reason for being.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One does not keep up a farce one's entire life.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The artist] was haunted, dominated, lost [...] by this false thought and this illusory ambition of wanting to translate the sensations of dreams into language.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The sober scholar ends up writing as a drunkard would speak.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] the doctor might well have to take the place of the victorious critic...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Caliban declares that he does not understand Ariel: one suspected as much.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If stupidity were to disarm, it would become wit, which is impossible.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It has happened to everyone to be haunted by a piece of music or an insignificant phrase that returns stubbornly, for no valid reason.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A man, however great he may be, [...] only holds his place in an immense cycle; he does not fill the entire cycle.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Literary friendships are [...] necessarily based on a community of opinions, tastes, and aesthetics.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He is never banal, but he is never natural: he always seeks to produce an effect.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Great sorrows are silent; those of poets are abundant in words, sometimes eloquent.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
But what does the sincerity of an attitude matter, if the attitude is beautiful?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Pain, like joy, is but a way of feeling, independent of the logical causes that the common person attributes to our grimaces or our smiles.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There comes an hour when one begins to tell one's own story. [...] One fine evening, it settles in. It's over; it will never leave you again. Its name is the Past.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is political freedom [...] that engendered the taste for literary freedom. Today, as political freedom tends to be restricted, literary freedom follows the same path.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This is commonly called giving oneself a strong literary culture. It is not as common as one might think.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Nothing is more difficult for a poet, that is to say for a man of great sensitivity, than pure objectivity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It would be absurd to say that whoever writes in French thinks in French; character [...] does not transform as easily as language.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Either science, or poetry: there is no middle ground.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Genius is economical with its strength. He who has beautiful marble to carve should carve it with his master's tools.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There are two literatures, one which accommodates the conservative tendencies, the other the destructive tendencies of humanity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If they have remained very independent, it is because they remember that. They owe gratitude to hardly anyone.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It was a curious wager against platitude; it was won: who will attempt it again?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A lovely custom [...] dictates that a dress be named after the woman who, by her bearing, charm, and distinction, has earned it fame and prestige in the world.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
to evoke with interlacings of words [...] outfits 'as fleeting as our thoughts'.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To travel, a prestigious word just yesterday, and of which today we seem to be searching for the distant and lost meaning.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
the elements of a five-act play, but, oh joy! they have remained in the state of elements!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
to add to the ancient, familiar solemnity [...] 'something like the foreign and the modern'.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
All of this, thrown together without a precise design, finds a harmony that creates itself...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
the perpetual unexpected giving his style the value of an October landscape that clouds [...] modulate.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The secret [...] of those suddenly empty and causeless hours, of those quasi-absences of yourselves [...]: a rhymer somewhere is thinking of you or your kind of beauty.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
the broken existence, the lines survive, collected by a pious sympathy.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A soul [...] returns almost whole to the eyes of anyone who reads them attentively, no less in the white spaces dividing the text than in the text itself...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
armed with style, one can leave one's mark, even on a pharmacist's recipe, even on the technical description of a dress...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
...all the flavor has not evaporated, and the literary value remains intact.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
My reverie had been consumed by the lamp of winter's wells...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This poetry gives me the impression of a delicate and clean trellis stretched over a known azure that I love...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
I am the Empire at the end of its decadence, [this line] served to christen an entire literary movement.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Their] tumultuous and incoherent beginnings are reminiscent of Flaubert's silent youth. [...] his first work was a masterpiece.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
almost all of them would have achieved fame sooner if the memory of their youthful excesses had not blocked their path to glory.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The cause? It has never yet been found. It is certainly more social than literary.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It was political freedom, then immense, that engendered the taste for literary freedom.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Today, as political freedom tends to be restricted, literary freedom follows the same path.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
As for us, fifteen years ago, we didn't even know there was a government.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We enjoyed the freedom to write, the freedom to live, [...] and we thought of nothing but speaking our minds, even when they were a little crazy.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Decadence: what a mistake! Never was there so much extravagance, perhaps because there was never so much vitality.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Talents were born every day. It was, as in the first ages of the world, a perpetual creation.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
this excessive disinterestedness, which led them to defy the public, [...] was also one of the causes of their belated success.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
They claimed to do without the vulgar reader, who did without them very easily.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In those days, to be able to print one's thoughts with freedom, one had to found a small journal oneself.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The writers of my generation who have achieved something have really had to fight against the whole world.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Everything that is in the past is legend. This past, however, is very recent; it is of yesterday, exactly.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Thanks to a host of critics, more eager to please than to judge, monumental epithets abound in the press.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To be a 'great writer,' to take one's place on the summits, among the finest representatives of humanity, what a burden and how to accept it without trembling?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One must be ready to stand alongside Plato, Dante, Rabelais, Voltaire, Goethe; that requires reflection.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This word [great] has, at the very least, only a relative meaning. It is impossible to measure it once and for all.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One can therefore be a very great figure among the ants and, among the elephants, a very mediocre sire.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Intellectual greatness cannot be measured, like a vineyard or a meadow, with a surveyor's chain.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Wit, more often than fortune, comes to us while we sleep.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Words, the clothing of our ideas, wear out like clothes, the clothing of our bodies [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Words constantly undergo a degradation of meaning.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Words] only retain their full meaning if they are used to designate objects that are immutable in their composition or use.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Words wear out, but it is up to us to prevent them from wearing out.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We let ourselves lavish epithets that should retain something of a sacred character.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
By dint of repeating laudatory epithets inappropriately, [people] have worn them out one after another.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To maintain the meaning of words, to yield to the force of things only at the last extremity, such must be the role of those who write.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In an extremely democratic social state, one is inclined to measure and weigh, rather than to judge.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We have grown accustomed to labeling as incapable the prudent writer who thinks long before writing, or the one who claims to first live the life he will later narrate.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The more one writes, the more the need to write intensifies. It becomes a disease...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He who sits on the side of the road is lost. As soon as he is no longer seen, his name is forgotten.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
These customs are savage; but in the end, they are our customs, and we are forced to accept them or to accept defeat.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
As if it were not better to live a novel than to write one, as if, after all, to write a good novel, one did not first have to live it!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To mingle with life to experiment with feelings and sensations, to gather material, [...] is a very mediocre and truly undignified way to live.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Therein lies an industrial exploitation of sensibility that diminishes talent as much as character.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[There is] this illusion that a writer's glory is measured [...] and that the most solid is the one that stands on the highest pyramid of books.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Abundance of production is sometimes a sign of strength [...] but sometimes it is also a sign of weakness; the pyramid collapses and its builder remains suffocated beneath the rubble.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Cerebral labor, too, is physical labor, and one must eat to write just as one must to carry burdens.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Serenity, that Olympian calm [...] which allows one to master life, to look upon it from a height.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Perhaps it is time to bring some measure to our labors, to condense our thought, and to think more while writing less.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
...and above all to live human lives, which is the very opposite of the lives of [convicts of the pen].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Delayed pleasures are all the better for it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Works of youth found in drawers rarely enhance an author's stature.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] there is a quality superior to perfection itself, and that is life.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Perfection can be seen as a halt in the evolution of forms. The flesh has become marble, and it is the end.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
From Racine's poetics nothing could emerge and nothing did: Racine is the perfect and sterile marble.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] living matter, it is indefinite fecundity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The idea of perfection sterilized French poetry for a century and a half [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Perfection is therefore no longer the criterion by which we will judge a work of art.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We shall ask [of a work of art] for beauty, a certain logical order, purity of language, originality of style, and freedom of thought.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A man of this stature does not belong to his heirs, but to [...] all of humanity [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] the two mediocre fellows understood nothing of the genius that was revealing itself to them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Like all men of true worth, the great Flaubert doubted himself.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He felt himself the equal of the masters only through admiration.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] the painful work that the subject imposes on him dampens the fire of his spontaneity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
By dint of turning a sentence over and over, he would end up no longer understanding it [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Happiness, luck, or fortune do not, in literature, have a very exact relationship with talent, and even less with genius.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is a commonplace that there are unknown talents and even geniuses.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One could name more than one person today who is not in their rightful place in the admiration of men and who, alas, perhaps never will be.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It will be said later, in literature manuals: their reputation did not equal their talent, — and then we will move on.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The reputation they had in their lifetime has become inexplicable, for their talent is truly most mediocre.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is, in certain writers, a charm; with equal merit, what comes from their pen pleases more.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The psychological mechanism of these aberrations [...] is based on intellectual laziness.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is over; the charm has worked. Everything this poet writes from now on will be admirable.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Instead of the disgusting sides of life, its most brilliant faces were shown: it was finally a matter of love, heroism, and beauty!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Everything is rejuvenated [...], nothing in it is new.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It takes more than talent to find such witty or delicate things; it takes happiness.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is a lake that shimmers gracefully [...], but which conceals no abyss, no mystery; its bottom is even and safe; one can bathe in it without ever losing one's footing.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The public, always fifty years behind the true literary movement, can still enjoy it; the poets no longer understand.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The theater magnifies everything, reputations like the rest.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He will undoubtedly remain in our literature [...] the representative of that state, rarest of all, literary happiness.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
All forms of life [...] seem to be conscious of the identity of their principle, and to strive to express it. They are the rays of the same sun.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Every idea that rises in the mind aims as it rises to pass from thought to action, exactly as the plant [...] struggles to rise to the light.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The idea is the seed of the act; but the act is just as much its second form as the idea is its first.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
What is inside wants to pass to the outside. The idea struggles to be born.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The conscious expression of thought, by speech or action, for any end whatever, constitutes Art.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The first and last lesson of the useful arts is that Nature exerts its tyrannical power over our works. They must conform to its laws [...].
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
In all our works, we do not seek to use our own strength, but to bring an infinite force to act.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Nature paints the best part of the picture, carves the best part of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and delivers the best part of the speech.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The artist [...] must depersonalize himself, be a man of no party, no fashion, no era, but one through whom the soul of all circulates.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The wonders of Shakespeare are things he saw while he stood aside, and which he returned to write afterwards.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Great poetry could not have been written otherwise than it is. [...] He found the verses, he did not make them. The Muse brought them to him.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
A masterpiece of art has for the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, just as much as a plant or a crystal.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The pleasure given by a work of art seems to come from recognizing in it the spirit that formed Nature, acting anew.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Proceeding from the eternal Reason, [...] all that is beautiful rests on the foundation of necessity. Nothing is isolated, nothing is arbitrary in the beautiful.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The arts always have their origin in some enthusiastic feeling [...]. Currently they languish, because they aim only at exhibition.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Idealism [...] was a true verbal idealism, meaning that he truly believed in the evocative power of words, in their magical virtue.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
'Every verb, [...] within the circle of its action, creates what it expresses.'
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[He] would slip in as a humble collaborator, happy to move among so many masters. It was his way of showing contempt.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
His wit, like that of almost all witty men, was of the staircase variety. Then, he would raise his finger and say the word found too late.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Sometimes, when he deeply despised a writer, [...] he would feign enthusiasm, launch into a fiery eulogy, and then [...] he would burst out laughing.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He was violently romantic. He used to say: 'There are the romantics and the imbeciles.'
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
His faith, very sincere in his later years, in no way prevented him from imagining, in words, the most beautiful blasphemies.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[We were talking about establishing] a kind of suicide house [...] Villiers suggested crucifixion 'for those who, tired of being men, would want to become gods'!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He said of [certain people]: 'He dishonors poverty.'
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is with these small changes that pages are spoiled...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He read in his imagination rather than in books.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He carried in his head an infinite number of projects; he would recite entire books of which not a single line was written.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A truly fecund being never realizes more than a thousandth part of his dream. He sees the pyramid to be built and barely manages to place a few stones one on top of the other!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Instead of accepting the physical progress of applied science as marvels, he shows its vanity by showing its limits.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One evening he sees the bare leg of a farm girl, and he wants that girl, and he shatters his machine.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
People had grown accustomed to considering as irrevocably dead the familiar art, the one that ennobles everyday objects.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Greek beauty itself is vexing when admired too closely. Passionate admiration tends to actualize itself, that is, to copy.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] artistic erudition and museums corrupt the ingenuous taste of a people.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Copying is so tempting for the lazy; it is such a restful form of activity!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The copy of a beautiful thing is always an ugly thing. It is, in admiration of an act of energy, an act of cowardice.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One must disdain all these minor absurdities and try to find what is important beneath the surface of hasty manifestations.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The human mind is never absurd for pleasure's sake, and whenever the products of consciousness appear devoid of reason, it is because one has not known how to understand them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In art, if it is a matter of understanding, it is above all a matter of feeling. Art is that which gives a sensation of both beauty and newness [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One may not understand well and yet be moved.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is no naturalist art, although there can be naturalist geniuses [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In art, geometry intervenes to halt and symmetrize the exuberances of life.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The flower is but a leaf mad with love.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is in the woods, the meadows, and the kitchen gardens that schools of decorative art should be held.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The female body is a motif particular to French decorative art.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Artists [...] after a long winter, discover nature one morning, and they want to pick all the flowers [...]. They will get used to their joy, and their sensations [...] will be transformed into a rich and sober art.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Nature is full of whims, and sometimes puts an old head on young shoulders, and sometimes a young, beating heart under eighty winters.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
If the essence of age is not present, these signs [...] are counterfeits and absurdities: the essence of age is intelligence.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Wherever there is power, there is age. Do not be deceived by dimples and curls.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Time is in reality the theater and the seat of illusion: nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind gives an hour the span of a century, and reduces a century to an hour.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
That which does not perish is so present, so dominant within us, that as long as we are alone with ourselves, we are not sensitive to the encroachments of time [...].
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Time is the surest poison. This cup, which Nature brings to our lips [...] opens the senses, increases the faculties, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
We only count an individual's years when there is nothing else about them that counts.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The skill to do things comes from doing them; knowledge comes from ever-open eyes and laborious hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
In youth, we live in a tumult of passions [...]. Later, the mind and heart open up and provide higher motives for activity.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
A key advantage of old age is that one more success or failure means nothing.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
All the honest days behind us are guarantors who speak for us when we are silent [...] and work for us when we sleep.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
Every new faculty [...] goads and pushes a person into melancholic solitudes, until they have found their own way out.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The best things grow slowly. The instinct to classify marks a wise and healthy mind.
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
When one has nobly spent one's life, old age is the loss of things one can easily do without [...].
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
The central wisdom, which was old in childhood, is young at eighty [...].
1870
Source: Society and Solitude
If literary history were written with the memories and judgments of contemporaries about one another, how little it would resemble the one that posterity more or less settles upon!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is certain that publishers cannot be understood without authors, but authors draw an evident profit from the publisher who gives them credit.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] this is precisely what poetry can and should be used for, to give some nobility to the expression of feelings, and nothing more.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
When poetry neglects sentiment, of which almost all human life is woven, it has only two sources from which to draw its lyricism: legend and description.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] poetry that does not move is very close to being nothing.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is no recipe for revitalizing poetry. It is a gift bestowed upon us when we take pride in our human condition and in all our sensations and emotions.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[A certain kind of poetry] gives us the impression of being handled by artists of extreme, but somewhat mechanical, skill, for whom the subject matters little, provided it allows for the display of virtuosity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Never has any school given such a role to talent, and talent is the torturer of poetry.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If we were to forbid poetry to poets who only have talent, we would be forbidding it to almost all of them, for genius is rarely able to stand on its own.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One only escapes the rules with time, and it is not always the best who escapes them first.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We can affirm that [an artist] will not survive through anecdote, for no witty remark is attributed to him [...]. He must count only on his work.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] minds that did not want to be divided, [...] gave themselves entirely to their noblest inclinations and ended up not dissociating them from the very exercise of life.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is admiration and there is love. Love for poets rarely survives the generation of their immediate disciples.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] in his work, the manner of expressing things does not prevail over the things it expresses.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Through these elementary feelings, [the poet] escapes the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Assyrians, and enters into eternal poetry.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Joubert spent his life thinking, as others spend their life living. [...] He lived only in thought.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This life is a tree and its fruits are men, One falls by itself and the other is struck down.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The pessimist] looks at life as it should be, and he notes, with a certain anger, the differences he observes between reality and his ideal.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What constitutes true talent for a writer is to express common thoughts in a rare way, or, better still, to express rare thoughts in a common way.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He who has the gift of style makes no other reproach to life than that of being too difficult to paint; but he loves it precisely because of the trouble he takes.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Wretched are the minds that have the mirage of the absolute! They disdain all that is merely relative, that is to say, the very substance of life.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One must not have the mirage of the absolute; it is indeed a great misfortune, [...] an affliction that can corrupt reason, since it weakens sensitivity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is not uncommon to see two old friends call each other scoundrels, but it is rare that they are not both right.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There are people capable of gratitude, but, unfortunately, they are almost never the ones we oblige.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
For anyone who no longer has a mother, there is still one sure way to be loved: to have a dog. But there is no other.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To be loved, one must first love. Only he who is incapable of either friendship or love finds neither.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A smile calls for a smile. To be happy, one must first make the gestures of happiness.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One becomes what one believes oneself to be, and the best way to be unhappy is to give oneself the illusion of unhappiness.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is very rare for two minds or two hearts to touch without at least one of them feeling a friction.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One carries one's own vanity with ease, but that of others seems very heavy.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Romanticism [...] was not only a mode of literature, but also and above all a mode of sensibility.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Reality is indomitable; you cannot bend it, you must bend to it. The dream, on the contrary, is an infinitely subtle and malleable material.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is from this conflict [between dream and reality] that what has been called the romantic malaise is born, which sometimes goes as far as disgust for life.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Sorrows [...] immediately turned into lyrical outpourings.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We are no longer romantics, but romanticism influenced us greatly. We must know the origin of our ideas.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The ancients committed suicide to avoid a greater evil. [...] One does not find, in all of Greek or Roman history, a single suicide whose cause is the impossibility of finding happiness.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This cause of suicide [the impossibility of finding happiness] is, in fact, of modern origin.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Men [...] have made themselves so many promises that they have been powerless to fulfill! They ended up giving themselves such a false notion of happiness!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We must not confuse the happiness that the ancients sought in balance [...] with that which philosophical reveries have placed in the eternal, in the infinite.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Life does not realize dreams; it contains only positive things.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Suicide presupposes the knowledge of death, and no animal has this knowledge.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The double fault [...] of romanticism [...] was the complete ignorance and contempt for reality and the constant, exclusive preoccupation with happiness.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Why insist on staying at the table when, instead of the feast you were promised, there is only a vile and bland cuisine to make you sick?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What does life give us? Nothing. What does death promise us? Everything. Many weak minds succumbed to this dreadful paradox.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Why this idea [of killing oneself] when one is a young, happy, and already famous poet, while walking in front of a beautiful landscape? That is the romantic mystery.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Adultery is an act of such a special nature that it has always depended on the court of public opinion, as well as on legal tribunals.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
As family ties became less strict, [...] adultery saw its criminal appearance diminish.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One must not judge customs by laws. Laws often only testify to fleeting intentions; they reflect only the opinion of a group that has managed for a moment to dominate the general will.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] the harsher a law is, the less it is applied.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] Christianity, like all reforms, [...] could only live by exploiting virtue.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Christianity in no way brought indulgence for carnal weaknesses into the world.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Adultery [...is] very different in each of the two sexes, both in its motives and in its consequences.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] the law was sleeping, because public opinion was no longer moved.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] a wife's infidelity almost always stems from the husband's inadequacy. Hence also the ridicule of deceived spouses, [...] of those who did not know how to make themselves loved.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Public malignity is very clairvoyant in this matter.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] one sees [...] very clearly the disagreement between laws and customs.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In France, [...] where adultery is one of the foundations of our literature, the raison d'être of our theater, [...] if no longer a crime, is still an offense.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One must not confuse immoral acts and offenses. The former fall under the Code; the latter, under conscience or opinion.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Marital infidelity harms one of the spouses; it does not harm society as a whole. These are private matters.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[To see] an act once punished by death become indifferent to the law. This will be a gain for freedom, human dignity, and civilization.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This legend, a work, in its essence, of the popular imagination, was written in the spirit of a Lutheran pamphleteer.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] if the writer saw in it only a subject for edification, a poet could well see in it a formidable drama.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In those days, the [...] stage was frequented by an audience (unlike today's) that was thirsty for novelty.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The fantasy element is very useful in a drama, correcting what is fatally too logical and too predictable in the action.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[There is] a love of science pushed to the point of consenting to abandon, for current and limited knowledge, the future possibility of absolute knowledge.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The science he needs is less that of Norms than that of pleasure; his ideal does not aim very high.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Like all deeply sensual men, he is melancholic and imagines that new and rare pleasures will cure him.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Formerly [...], these kinds of restless souls willingly turned to magic.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He makes a real fool's bargain; [...] one feels more pity than fear and pities the poor fool who did not get his money's worth.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The 'formidable drama' that Marlowe certainly glimpsed, we do not find the impression of it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Except in English literature [...], Marlowe's Faust no longer exists: Goethe [...] erased it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[It is] the work that renewed idealist art, restored faith in the idea, put back in their logical places the World, which is appearance, and the Idea, which is being.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We are always curious about the youth of great men, but upon examining this period of their lives closely, we are also almost always disappointed.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] it is perhaps precisely the banality of these young lives that makes them interesting, showing us how childhood impressions common to all [...] are far from leaving equally deep traces in memory.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If education were everything, [such an education] would have served better to compress than to develop an intelligence.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He never truly loved except in the past, in memory, and never knew, in his perpetual mobility, how to give himself to the present feeling.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He detached himself from realized desire, for which he soon felt only weariness, to endlessly reach for a chimerical future happiness.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is curious that a religious education left such a strong mark on such a versatile mind.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[A certain] mobility of impressions [...] stems from one's very nature and not from external causes.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[His] character is such that he is under the absolute dependence of events.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Two [...] letters written in the same week [...] express absolutely contradictory views on life, perhaps because he was bored in the morning and enjoying himself in the afternoon.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Some are] poets [...] in verse, in prose, in the conduct of life.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
I do believe that [such a poet] never knew, in a literary sense, what he was doing.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] isn't there something touching in these illusions, in their very naivety, [...] in this schoolboy character they suggest in the great poet who cannot admit that his games are more important than his work.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Their soul was a chaos like the new society.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A rare and beautiful friendship where two men respect each other enough, while loving each other, not to catechize one another, as happens all too often.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Reality is far superior [to the novel] in its human truth, so tragic and moving.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Only fairies [...] can tell such charming stories as Sleeping Beauty [...] or Beauty and the Beast, that marvel.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Since men have been making literature [...], they have lost the ability to imagine these pretty things called fairy tales.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One only truly understands the story upon reaching the final page. At that moment, everything becomes clear and the mind is satisfied.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One awaits the happy ending without any anxiety. It is expected, and besides, the journey is so charming that one gladly lingers.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
None of the great academic "critics" have mentioned it; it is too delicate for them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The fairy tale [...] has produced as many masterpieces as theater and the novel.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Either science or poetry: there is no middle ground.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
When a true history of French literature is written, a serious work where accuracy is not sacrificed for moral and pedagogical considerations...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If they are hardly read anymore, their titles, at least, have entered the language where they have the value of true idioms.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is [the author's] flaw that he is not at all duped by his own stories: he tells them with grace, [...] but now and then he stops to smile at himself.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
She was a talented woman who had her hour of genius: one should only consider the genius in her and hold it in deep admiration.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In affirming that [this tale] is a masterpiece, I do not let childhood memories influence my literary judgment.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The Beast] is depicted as a sort of white bear dotted with black spots. This naivety is much more intelligent than the imagination of modern illustrators.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In his [animal] form, [the character] offers [...] little attraction for a young girl, but, as is [...] necessary, he inspires neither disgust nor terror.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Perhaps [...] fairy tales will be brought back into fashion? Then, some curious person might try to unravel their literary history; that would be very useful.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[He] passes by, smiling at our quirks, without seeing our vices, our follies, without dwelling on our wickedness.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Chauvinism is a plant that reaches [...] tropical proportions.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One of the great advantages [of a person] is the sweetness and variety of their smile. [...] she wields her smile with such great perfection that she has managed to adapt it either to the degree of sentiment she must express or to the dignity of the person.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This is how one judges a country based on the staff of its boarding houses.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This is how one must love one's language: in the sentence the words, in the words the syllables, in the syllables the letters.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The constitution of the United States and general habits are fundamentally democratic; literature there is more aristocratic than in England itself.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Nature, having invented and manufactured authors, noticed she had some scraps left over; she made critics out of them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Nothing is so common as to mistake a banal aptitude for a special gift and an unequivocal sign of a calling.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Life offers them a place on a bench, a chain on their feet, and an oar to be pulled night and day.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We are beginning to understand that there is no way to study any religion separately. One must do comparative theology, just as one does comparative anatomy.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Many ideas grow better once transplanted into an intelligence other than the one where they first sprouted.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Liberty is often a heavy burden for a man. It implies the necessity of perpetual choice, which constitutes the kind of work most repugnant to human creatures.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In politics, the organization of parties is merely the means of relieving ourselves of the trouble of thinking.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The art of destruction is within the reach of the most limited minds. Nothing prevents a coarse lout from taking a hammer and knocking the nose off every statue [...], after which he can snicker with pleasure at his work.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One must not introduce ridicule where there is none. It is to spoil one's taste, to corrupt one's judgment and that of others.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is a matter of feeling and not a matter of understanding.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[His] criticism is nonexistent; anything that is edifying seems accurate to him.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This state of mind is less a product of the times than of the environment.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A miraculous account is never authentic nor apocryphal. [...] it has psychological value [...] and never any historical value.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A miracle is never reasonable; the more absurd it is, the more characteristic it is.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One would want not a book of piety, but a book of tales that would take its place in the first rank among collections of popular tales.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
These beautiful stories should be snatched from clumsy piety [...] and avenged for the stupid disdain professed for all legend, all poetry [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This Christian literature contains so much ingenuous paganism!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is a curious contradiction [...] that books of piety, like books of poetry, become more numerous as the world loses interest in both piety and poetry.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is probably because a sentimental elite remains, undefeated and even growing.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The] version is clearer, more modern. [...] I might wish he wrote less well, in any case not better than [the original author].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] this ecclesiastical and familiar Latin, with its analytical syntax, is most pleasant to read.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Our age is retrospective. [...] Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
The sun shines today also. [...] Let us demand our own works, and laws, and worship.
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
The condition of each man is a solution in hieroglyphics to the questions he would put.
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
To a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical.
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore [...].
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
Few adult persons can see nature. [...] The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
In the woods, we return to reason and faith.
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
Standing on the bare ground, [...] all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all.
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
The eye is the best of artists.
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
An action is the perfection and publication of thought.
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
Build, therefore, your own world.
1836
Source: Nature (Emerson)
The exercise of thought has become too easy.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
All original intelligences are made this way; they are the expression, the flowering of a physiology.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
By dint of living, one acquires the faculty to dissociate one's intelligence from one's sensitivity [...], through the acquisition of a new, indispensable though dangerous faculty: skepticism.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To free himself from his young sentimentalism [...], he used irony; but the sentimentalism resisted, and he could never overcome it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Men who are past the age where feeling is expressed with such genuineness regret no longer being capable of such candor.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Love, at the first blow, conquered irony.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Deep down, woman is a commonplace being.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Women, those mediocre and magical beings.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Life may be realistic and humdrum, but the irresistible argument [...] to conquer a woman is the threat of suicide.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The young girl [...] is [...] an almost supernatural being; she is seen [...] in a celestial atmosphere that isolates her from the vulgar world.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The ironist] is perhaps a fool, deep down, but does not wish to appear so, even to himself.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
With the shamelessness of writers who make literature out of the most intimate parts of their own lives...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The perpetual struggle waged [within the artist] between intelligence and sensitivity [...] can yield the most beautiful, most living works.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The unfinished work] consists of the foundations of a palace barely out of the ground, but already visible enough to bear witness to the architect's genius.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
No one represents this extraordinary sentimental irony.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Saint-Amant has all the gifts of a great poet, and yet it would perhaps be excessive to call him so.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Taste varies with social circles, with generations, and we cannot [...] blame [an artist] for sometimes offending certain decadent sensibilities.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He loved the sea, which in seventeenth-century France seems a paradox.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The artist] captures very well the dominant feature of a landscape, of a climate [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[It is] an admirable thing [...] that the same person could [...] succeed equally in two ways of writing that are of such a different nature.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He who sang so loudly the praises of the vine was perhaps but a mediocre drinker [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] poetry is to become reasonable, which is its way of losing all reason for being.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Great works are the trap of poets who are not first-rate geniuses.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A poem should not be so long that one cannot read it in a single sitting.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The artist] is all exterior, an artist far more than a sensitive poet.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
When one has entered the path of literary comparisons, one would go far, if common sense or taste did not stop you.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Strength is what dominates in him. His verse is robust.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The reign is about to begin of those who were psychologists more than artists and moralists more than poets.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The newcomers] believed they had the strength to cast into shadow all the literature that preceded them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
While the imitation of the ancients was to become the great literary rule, Saint-Amant frankly admitted that he knew little Latin and even less Greek [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Sometimes he had talent, and sometimes he didn't.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
His sensibility was disordered, and his ideas were slight.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He loved nature with passion, and sometimes this exaltation was translated into beautiful tones.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The years [...] were leaving him with fewer laurels on his head than white hairs.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[He] only said these things to draw the people's attention to himself. But the people were distracted by other speeches, other spectacles...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Solitude at first enchanted him and made his soul more poetic than ever.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Everything was escaping him at once: glory and love.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
His genius, obscured by sorrow, seemed to him to be taking on new colors.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The moments of exaltation subsequently became shorter and shorter.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Some people] are on the lookout for all social forces, large or small, that they hope to divert for their own benefit.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It seems that by becoming scum, I was becoming an asset.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Just because it is lucrative does not make my conversion any less sincere.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The gods are rich, and it is only natural that they enrich their friends.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Without the protection of the gods, he would be quite forgotten.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Conversion, it's the only thing left that brings fame.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To belong to everyone, to become everyone's daily bread, is that not the dream of all writers worthy of the name?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The dead, after all, are right where destiny has laid them, and their glory or our pride are perhaps not worth disturbing their eternal sleep.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What remains of a dead person, whoever they may be, is the idea we have of them, a more or less living memory in our minds.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
No discovery was ever made on its own; at the source of all manifestations of our activity, there is a genius who meditates, and whose meditations were often painful.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One must not judge customs by laws. Laws often only testify to fleeting intentions; they often only reflect the opinion of a group that has momentarily succeeded in dominating the general will.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] the harsher a law is, the less it is applied.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Words, the clothes of our ideas, wear out like clothes, the garments of our bodies [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To maintain the meaning of words, to yield to the force of things only as a last resort, such must be the role of those who write.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The possible is only accessible through the impossible, and to build a cottage [...], one must perhaps dream of a vast estate [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is an excellent condition to have desired everything in order to be content with almost nothing.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One must [...] know how to live in the present, in the very minute. Not to fear the future, but not to grant it excessive confidence either, for its very existence is uncertain.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Men are funny: when no one comes quickly enough to steal their freedom, they steal it themselves.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What seemed bold is, twenty years later, innocuous.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One can never respect too much the genius, intelligence, and high manifestations of human sensitivity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One must not confuse immoral acts and offenses. The latter fall under the Code; the former, under conscience or opinion.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Intelligence is disinterested. It finds its goal in the very manifestation of its activity; it is only as a surplus and as if by accident that it becomes practical.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Genius is almost always accompanied by a strong propensity for play; great men, in their moments of relaxation, readily behave like children [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is the privilege of great intelligences that they always retain the faculty of smiling and sometimes of laughing. The child is not entirely abolished in the mature man; he hides there [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To remain stationary, when it comes to intelligence, is to decline, for as the years accumulate, the external world casts an ever-thicker shadow upon them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In general, the man of genius [...] is the one who succeeds in keeping his intellectual level constant, given that this level is naturally very high.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Criticism is perhaps the most subjective of all literary genres; it is a perpetual confession; in believing one is analyzing the works of others, it is oneself that one unveils.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A false thought is never well written, nor a just thought poorly written. There is something inseparable there.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is a belief of literature professors that in art there is content and form [...]. Content and container are inseparable; they are born together and grow together [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To admit that one cannot affirm is a more honest attitude than to affirm without proof. Now, when one affirms, when one proclaims the Truth, it is always without proof.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What life refuses, what it takes back, one asks of death.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Not every truth is good to endure. We are the children of the past. It is true, but it is perhaps better to forget it than to remember it too much.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What characterizes man is precisely this faculty of modifying, by repeating it infinitely, the hereditary gesture.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To doubt oneself: a terrible accident, but one that only happens to superior souls, to those who [...] seek, with candid obstinacy, the sad and unattainable truth.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Happiness, luck, or fortune do not, in literature, have a very exact relationship with talent, and even less with genius.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Woman, even in extreme civilization, is always much more natural than man, much closer to life, more physical, in a word.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A view of literature, isolated from the history of nations, [...] would create a prodigious lie.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is always in a nation, at the moment of catastrophes and the greatest events, a priest who prays, a poet who sings.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Even at the moment of the most tumultuous political catastrophes, there are still retreats [...] where one can live in peace, pray, dream, and write verses.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Until the age of thirty, the Frenchman is a poet; beyond that, he becomes a statesman and aspires to govern his country.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
'My name will die without glory,' which is to say: I would like my name to live in glory, but I have too much pride to let the men I despise suspect my desire.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
May each day of my life, happy until its decline, be a plucked rose that loses its petals in my hand.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Everything passes, and everything dies out; the elapsed centuries will be lost endlessly in an eternal abyss upon the accumulated centuries.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The Rose depicts beauty for us, but talent is the everlasting flower.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The Revolution does not seem to have aroused emotions in men capable of transposing them into poetry.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The death of a few more or fewer men changes neither the color of the flowers nor that of the eyes.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is a willow for the sage, there is a willow for the lover. The first suits my age; but, alas, how charming is the other.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
I would like to find a nook made for love and for study. [...] a small alcove where the light only half enters, for fear of dazzling the mystery.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
With freedom of morals, finally regained, life resumes its normal course; poetry is possible. If it does not flourish, it is henceforth without excuse.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Better than books, the Almanach des Muses is a good mirror of the poetry of that era. This small collection is precious, a puny but green grove of palm trees in the sand.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Without legal proceedings, [a work] might have waited many years before reaching the European fame it suddenly achieved.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Posterity, which takes little account of official functions, will only remember the torturer of literature.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[He] obeyed the regime that persecuted all independence of mind, all literature where the slightest appearance of insubordination was noted.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The censor] had the loyalty to recognize that the book was full of talent. It is true that he added: that only makes it more dangerous.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The work] was accused of slandering France and debasing it in the eyes of foreigners, a refrain that our moralists take up [...] in relation to any slightly daring work.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Stupidity being the thing that renews itself the least.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The critic] understood nothing, nothing at all, about the character. He constantly reproaches the author for not having created a model wife, an impeccable mother.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This magistrate [...] does not for a moment accept that one has the right to tell [commonplace stories].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He finds in this story, where the author's personality nevertheless disappears so completely, a 'glorification of adultery'.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
By using almost no commonplaces, no clichés, [...] by choosing his words one by one, [the author] had given the slightest of his descriptions a quality of novelty.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The marvel of this book is that nothing in it is new, and yet everything is renewed.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
They rebelled against the writer who, by depicting life with accuracy and with art, seemed to lay it bare.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The truth is that any well-written novel, that is to say, one with an original style, always seems immoral.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Such a system applied to works of the mind [...] would lead to a realism that would be the negation of the beautiful and the good.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This is what [censors] are for. They serve a purpose.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Do as everyone else does.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The unexpected nobility of such a statement impressed us deeply[...]
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The love of a simple style, of gentle irony, of the half-tender, half-mischievous innuendo[...]
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The art of novelistic hypotheses, of fanciful or hasty deductions[...]
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There are habits of mind at odds with what masters expect from a disciple.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Be reasonable, first write what was asked of you, — and I will give you back your toy.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Poor great man! There he is [...] in the land of Shadows!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He has left the joys of his life, after having understood their nothingness[...]
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
...after having felt the universal vanity of everything: of glory and banquets, of friendship and interviews, of kindness and philology.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
On the threshold of his eternity, somewhere in the spaces, he has made an acquaintance[...]
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
However, I fear—the meeting must have been a stormy one.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One understood that the conversation was over, and he took his leave, with a knowing smile, [...] promising the most absolute secrecy.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man: she is also something rarer.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Man has an immense role in a woman's life, but it is fleeting; whereas the natural role of woman is durable.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Man represents only himself; woman represents all of posterity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Society is built upon woman; she is its cornerstone.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Woman] is debased every time she abandons her role as a woman to imitate men.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
For woman, perfection is unique: she is perfect when she is profoundly a woman [...] and joyfully fulfills all her duties as a woman.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Woman, even in extreme civilization, is always much more natural than man, much closer to life, more physical, in a word.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To speak of woman as an abstraction is absurd. Man is not an abstraction either; but he can live in abstraction, and this is impossible for woman.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Women [...] are rarely fond of things, more often of people...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A system of philosophy is nothing but the expression of a particular physiology.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Women are more frank and more natural, that is all. [...] They are only deceitful when man forces them to defend themselves against him.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There are many deceived men; there are even more deceived women. They know this and, being less foolish than men, they get angry less often than them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Inexperienced young girls flatter themselves with the idea that it is in their power to make a man happy; later, they learn that this amounts to devaluing him.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
All married people are suspect.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What is suspect, in truth, is the opinion on women and love from a man, even a great philosopher, who is ignorant of both love and women.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
When a man past fifty tries to untangle his childhood ideas from his present ones, he doesn't succeed very well [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We will never know anything about the psychic life of children [...], because we can only understand through analogy, and there is none between a man and a child.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Man and child] live in such different worlds that one can only gain knowledge of the other through very rare intuition.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Writings about the child have too often seen in this little being only a man in reduction, instead of the young animal [...] who possesses all human powers, but only in a virtual state.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Jealousy is by no means an indication of love [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Jealousy is born from the feeling of ownership and a fear of losing that property, which is a tangible benefit.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One never gets used to jealousy; one endures it, one never recovers from it, as long as the cause remains.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A child always has something to complain about from those who indiscriminately thwart his will.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A man in his later years must fall for a woman or a piece of land, and it is unknown which of these two tastes has the more unfortunate consequences.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The same news rarely excites a jailer and a prisoner, a victim and an executioner, in the same way.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
That which has once opposed our will can only be hateful.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
As often happens, one clearly separates the religious idea, religious art, and religious ceremonies from the detested idea of the clergy.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There are so many successive layers in a man's psychology [...] that he can easily locate a fact, but not an emotion.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A feeling penetrates through the successive layers of a person, and it is often impossible to trace it back to its true origin.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This book is the most extraordinary inquiry a man has ever attempted into his past with only the resources of memory, and perhaps the most sincere ever made.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What makes literary studies on the Middle Ages suspect to the public is above all the apparatus of erudition with which we like to surround them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Specialists write for specialists and rarely depart from a scientific tone.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
literary matter belongs to anyone who believes themselves gifted enough with taste and feeling to judge its form and appreciate its beauty...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To discourse on what one knows too well, what a bore! Whereas to untangle one's ideas as they are exposed at least provides the joys of discovery...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Women, at least certain women, love with their imagination far more than with their senses...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The more love is distinguished from function, the more nobility it contains.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A feeling cannot be destroyed by reasoning...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Loved and sung by him, she will live, perhaps eternally, in the memory and love of men.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
According to nature, they are separate; according to civilization and according to poetry, they are united.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A loving gift given and received in secret is worth a hundred, and one day well spent is worth a year...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The coward will never have a beautiful sweetheart. (A coward (shy, timid) will never succeed in love.)
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What you love in me is the smell of my books!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is the novel's still point, which is to say its highest point, its moment of immobility, between heaven and earth, the instant when the lovers are as if suspended in space...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What is always least good and least interesting in novels, as in life, [...] is the conclusion.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Life rarely provides a man of genius with a novel so harmoniously constructed.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The various forms of art have their destiny. It is rare that they all flourish at the same time in the same environment.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Genius is born when it wishes, that is, without any relationship being able to be established between its appearance and the present state of civilization.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If painting is in fashion, the most miraculous sculpture will not be admired as it would be if sculpture responded to the dominant taste.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] what determines [...] the development of a great genius [...] is perhaps less the inherent force of his genius itself than the influence exerted on him by thousands of sensibilities awaiting the aesthetic thrill from his work.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The strongest of these three factors is the moment; one can escape the environment [...] the hour is always the master.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We only leave the banal to enter the baroque, imitation to engage in the absurd. We create the grandiose or the pretty [...] but without ever achieving beauty.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Why? It is because our sensibility is no longer touched by architecture. It still interests us; it no longer moves us.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We lack the sense of architecture and the feeling for it. Other senses and other feelings have developed within us, stifling that one.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One might believe [...] that the architectural sentiment is linked to the religious sentiment. This is only partly true.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If their cathedrals are magnificent, it is because they could not make them otherwise. What they built to house themselves was no less beautiful than what they erected to the glory of God.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Here is the key point of the explanation [...]: they were ignorant of nature. Unable to enjoy the earth [...], they were obliged, to excite their sensibility, to create an artificial world, to erect forests of stone.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Repelled by the hostility of nature, man therefore built artificial landscapes for himself.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] the beautiful cathedrals were built by a singing and dancing people, happy to satisfy their sensibility, drunk with the work that so fully contented it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Nature has replaced art.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We no longer have created architecture because we have discovered natural architecture.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In twenty years, the world of men has renewed itself [...]. When we look around us, on a day of reflection, we find almost nothing left of what charmed and guided our youth.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The symbolist poet] only reveals the second image [of the comparison], the one that served to illuminate and poeticize the first.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It seems that all things in life having been said a thousand and a thousand times, nothing is left for the poet but to point at them while murmuring a few words to accompany his gesture.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[A style's obscurity] seems to have no other mystery; [the artist] was led to it by an excess of delicacy, an excess of art.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is good, perhaps, to have felt the pride of spontaneous obscurity in style, in order to fully enjoy the joys of a tempered clarity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The genius of writing is perhaps to know the proportion [between the known and the unknown] and not to know that one knows it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Thus is woven, from generation to generation, the tradition of thought [...], and even those who believe themselves outside of it are in reality but one of the links in the eternal chain.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is quite useless today to pile up reasonable criticisms against [a great artist]. He is embedded in the admiration that has risen around him to the height of a mountain.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Men [...] are simplifiers. A writer, for his name to be remembered, must have only one quality.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is not so much the desire for the better that determines [revolutions] as the need for the new.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
I admit that [certain] poetry is not for the masses, but which is, except for some [...] song of easy melancholy or smile?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What, alas, can remain of a poet after the color of his sensibility is no longer in fashion? A few detached verses, often and no more.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It's astonishing, the divine music that twelve French syllables can make!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The complete science of literary journals is difficult, and [...] yet it is the only authentic source, for a century, of our literary history.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This work of erudition is a work of taste, also of good literature: it deserves to remain.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Scholars and poets [...] undertook to introduce the particular legends of a race into general literature.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The real origin of a legend [...] doubtless dates back to the obscure times of an autonomous civilization.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Tristan mistakenly drinks a potion [...] that is meant to bind him eternally to the woman he has chosen. Hence the fatal love.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The tragedy of the scene is this: Tristan appears unrecognizable before the queen.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He doubts Iseut, believes himself abandoned, betrayed. He wants her to recognize him by less material signs, by the mere recall of their past love, by the sound of his soul rather than the sound of his voice.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The test fails: he despairs, becomes indignant, and contrasts the faithfulness of his dog with his forgetful beloved.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
I may have recognized you as quickly as he did, but I refused to believe my instinct. We are watched, surrounded by tricks. I was protecting myself and protecting you.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Neither the reminders of our past life proved anything: someone could have discovered our secrets.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Nor the sound of your voice: an enchanter could have faked it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Had I not sworn that, the day I saw it, I would immediately do whatever you asked of me, whether it be wisdom or folly?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The version of the story that satisfies the mind is the one where Iseut is not humiliated, nor is Tristan suspected of having deceived his beloved.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Such is, in my opinion, the original form of the episode, although no text preserves it; it alone satisfies the mind.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
No matter, we now have a Tristan and Iseut.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Literature has been enriched by a beautiful novel that is both old and new.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Rivarol is the Hercules of pleasantry, and if he deigns to answer you, he can dissolve the remnants of your existence with a single word.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
I call a cat a cat, and Coquillard a fool.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Rivarol's wit is of such a quality that one can very quickly, even when inexpert, distinguish his diamonds from among the small pebbles with which he mixes them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Impertinence is not irony.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Women have much more flexibility than weakness in their character, and, apart from constancy, one can expect anything from them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
As soon as a woman is pleasing, she is in her place everywhere.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Why not let a woman believe you admire her when you only desire her?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In them [women], everything is instinct, and, consequently, nothing is culpable.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One will only find pleasantries in women when one only looks for women in them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] what they [women] understand the least is almost always what flatters them the most.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Finally, if we want to make them happy without making ourselves ridiculous, let us do everything for them and nothing through them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The idea that love must be a school of virtue seems clownish [...], and it is the clown who pours out wisdom.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Everything is but contradiction, and men are so diverse that one can only know them one by one. The science of man is chimerical [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Then came the Revolution. Its first years were witty, and as wit is a weapon of defense, [...] it was almost exclusively the counter-revolutionary camp that had wit.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One needs [...] such strong reasons to live, that none are needed to die.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The history of literature [...] has almost only ever been considered from the point of view of morality and education.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Never will [certain people] agree to separate, in a great writer, literary genius from moral value, the value of submission to custom.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One always looks for [in a great writer] the harmony of a great talent and a great character.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One imitates a manner, one does not imitate a nature.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One must rise above the rules, which always have something dark and dead about them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There are [...] no bonds other than voluntary bonds.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The freedom to write with the law one sets for oneself as the only guide [...], the freedom to live with no other norm than the feeling of one's own conduct.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There are sensitive egoists, [...] who suffer from the misfortune of those who love them, because it disturbs their own peace of mind.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
No particular calling except for beauty, and grace, more beautiful still than beauty.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One sees in it the reflection of an inner fire and the dark charms of a melancholic heart.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[They claim] the self is hateful, [but] only the self is interesting, because only the self is alive.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He takes life as it is, and paints it as he sees it. But how one feels that it is all indifferent to him!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is a very strange idea to want to make a moralist [out of an artist]. He perceives good and evil only in their relation to himself.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The artist] is of a magnificent unconsciousness. He is nature itself.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Machiavelli was the least Machiavellian of men.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is no Machiavellianism without hypocrisy, and Machiavelli was the least hypocritical of men, as he was perhaps the most clumsy.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] when one has read Herodotus, one has read everything and nothing can surprise you anymore.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Something changes, however: it is our way of seeing and understanding things, for there is a fashion for sensibility and for intelligence [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What one generation or era admired, the following generation or era never fails to despise it [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] today's glory is tomorrow's ignominy and vice versa, but what was glorious one day may well become so again [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Happy, however, is the one who would have firm principles, principles that would be passed down, like the furniture of the house in olden days.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What once charmed an aristocracy falls to the pleasures of the people, and it is among the pleasures of the people that the aristocracy sometimes comes to seek its own.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Experience [...] shows that great things have only been achieved by princes who have made little account of their word and who have known how to deceive others [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Machiavelli does not disregard morality, but he places truth above morality.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Besides, he does not say that it is good not to keep one's word, he says that it is useful, that it is profitable.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] in practice, nations do not behave among themselves as honest individuals behave among themselves.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Machiavelli is not a theorist, he is an observer.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Our religion has glorified only humble and contemplative men, not men of action.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The whole of humanity, in order to go to Paradise, thinks more of suffering blows than of avenging them.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He loves poetry, but first, he loves the method.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] the old flaw of giving an interpretation, or even a sort of offensive translation, of contemporary poems...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is some dread in looking at the mechanism of this brain which imposes [...] such tortures only to awaken nothing but innocent images.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This disorder, which is perhaps only too personal an order...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
From an early age, he wanted to write verses that would resemble no one else's...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] the only way for a genius, whose material was limited [...], to give the impression of the new, was to [...] rarefy its expression.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] by dint of comparing [...] the words of the dictionary, one ends up attributing to them [...] an absolute aesthetic value, apart from their value in use.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
When one reflects too much on the mechanism of languages, one can come to conceive of the very uselessness of this mechanism...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The printed page takes on at once the value of a pictorial painting and a table of values. The words live, the letters, even the white spaces...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The god is sick, struggling against the impossibility of finding an expression adequate to his thought. It is painful, and I prefer the man.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The value of a thought is in its expression; it is the salt of the expression that confers [...] its flavor.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One must never separate [thought and expression]: separated, they fall to nothing, thought to banality, expression to nullity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] it turns out that the poet, who imprisoned himself within, spreads out towards the sympathy of all hearts.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is exactly under these syllables what you will find there, but you must look for yourself.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is the fate of poems, having become oracular, that one hears in them what one needs to hear.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Art is above decency.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We have forgotten. They remember.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Belgium is still very fond of France—but from a distance.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Neither good, nor great, nor petty, nor wicked—she lived.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
By dint of lasting, one seems to be someone.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Great sovereigns are necessarily as rare as great artists or great scientists.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The ordinary mediocrity of kings is no more an argument against royalty than the mediocrity of painters is against painting.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The chance of birth is less cruel than the chances of election.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
However worthless kings may be, they are better fallen from the sky than emerged from the swamp; but the frogs are never satisfied.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What characterized him was the hatred of poetry and high literature.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is only one word for the great man, the superman: — Napoleon.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One must adore wit; it is one of the two or three superior manifestations of humanity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Crystals have a kind of life. A crystal wounded at its point heals its wound.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Such an intellectual] is famous in Salamanca and unknown in Paris. That explains his bitterness and his reactionary attitude.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
An entirely new civilization is developing [...], not under the influence of Spain, but under the influence of Europe.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The Revolution is a spectacle, but with almost no spectators, for the audience wants to imitate the actors [...]. Everyone is agitated, everyone is shouting; hatred mixes with enthusiasm.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Even in the most chaotic scenes, there is always a witness or two [...] who, immersed in the crowd, are not part of the crowd: having been witnesses, they will be judges.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To see is to see in a certain light; to know is to know in a certain sense.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Intelligence, lest it wither almost immediately, cannot be separated from sensibility, which is its root.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The strength of States rests almost entirely on a set of social traditions that cannot be touched without causing the ruin of the edifice.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Men are not and never will be equal, but they will want to become so and will not believe they have succeeded until they have eliminated all social superiorities.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The legislator] perpetually believes he is ensuring peace and yet he unleashes war; this is because he legislates for the abstract man [...] and such a variety of man does not exist.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There exists only the social man, man embedded in society like a tree in a forest. [Some] imagine they can destroy the forest without touching the trees.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Their] first concern is to remove [...] authority; but they are incapable of taking it themselves. Then, sovereignty falls into disuse: anarchy begins.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Either the [ruler] will have an army or the army will have a [ruler]; and in either case, it is the beginning of a military dictatorship.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is no poet so bad that he does not have followers.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Woe to [a leader] if he is not always victorious.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[One] way to criticize is with excessive benevolence, exaggerated praise, gentle irony.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Do you see those [people] clubbing together to understand a witticism!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[In a revolution], the [bad poet] would have had the [good critic] beheaded.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Is it not the characteristic of certain modesties to be always peculiar and always immodest?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is a fatality of character, [...] which is the explanation for everything, and which dominates all our actions and all our judgments.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[One only discovers the other] later, like an unknown land, at the same time as one discovers oneself.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is no genius without continuity, and even when it proceeds only by flashes, they come from a source a little broader than mere will-o'-the-wisps.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is with a very painful reflection [...] that I realize I have lost some of my sensitivity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Last year, I would not have survived such a terrible blow.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The writer] gets emotional when he writes [...] but if he forgets himself, what aridity!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Some people's] thoughts are merely feelings; they emerge with difficulty from their soul.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Some people] have a brusque and concealed tenderness: they appear and disappear; their joys and sorrows are enigmatic.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[...] to bring a little rest to a sick imagination that has strayed from the paths of nature.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
That was the secret of her heart, and perhaps that of her madness.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[This] has, moreover, an unpleasant side, as do all things that are too natural.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If a woman truly loses her virginity only with pleasure...
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is nothing new under the sun. [...] feminism was a widespread idea in the time of Louis XIV, already known under Louis XIII, almost popularized under Louis XV.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[One must] get rid of prejudices.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The author] proposes to show not that the two sexes are equivalent, but that they are equal, that woman is capable of the same culture as man, of the same work, of the same virtues.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[God] created them perfect each in their own way, and everything that depends on their particular constitution must be considered as part of their perfection.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is [...] without reason that we imagine women are not as perfect as men, and that we see in them as a flaw what is an essential attribute of their sex.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Beauty being as real a good as strength and health, reason does not forbid one from valuing it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If one were to judge its price by the passions it excites, [...] one would find that there is nothing more estimable, as there is nothing more effective.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Women are, just like men, suited for all higher professions, for all jobs.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It would be a pleasant thing to see a woman teaching eloquence or medicine from a professor's chair [...] leading an army; speaking before Republics or Princes as the head of an embassy.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This practice would surprise us, but only because of its novelty.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If, when these various jobs were created, women had been called to them, we would be accustomed to it [...] and it would seem no more singular to us to see them sitting in Parliament than behind a counter.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A priest from the time of Louis XIV gives lessons in audacity to our most progressive parties.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The very excess of the satire shows how much [...] customs have changed.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The woman, around the middle of the eighteenth century, freed herself [...] from domestic slavery; she became 'the mistress of the house,' the one who commands, the one who is responsible.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There are changes in customs that, when they are in the air, remain there for a long time; others remain there forever.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We can no longer conceive of literary genius being embodied in a man who simply devotes himself to the craft he has fallen into, but who does it supremely.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A man [...] who envies nothing because his imagination possesses everything, for whom life is but a span of time that love and the tavern fill poorly.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This life is admirable for its simplicity. It is so devoid of even the appearance of theatricality and charlatanism, so gently bent to necessity and order.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[We are] firmly convinced [...] that there must be a logical relationship between things and beings.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One does not retire to the talkative solitude of a small town when one has written Hamlet.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It is our obsession with documentation that makes us believe one must know a country to dare set the scenes of a dramatic action there.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He was not a weaver, he was an embroiderer. He needed a theme, he needed a canvas.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
On reflection, [invention] is [...] insignificant, as it is illusory. One hardly finds, one rediscovers.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
His excursions were all made inside the human heart or on the wings of fantasy.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The error [...] of all literary criticism [...] is to absolutely want to find the man in the work.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
One never manages to prove that the man represents the work and that the work represents the man.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The genius of man is illogicality itself and [...] the greater this genius, the less it agrees with the logic of life.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Genius is revolt; [...] it rebels even against itself, and its work tells of its life only to the extent that it has been dominated by it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To use philosophical jargon, there are objective geniuses and subjective geniuses.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
I love those who rise, those who become, those who fulfill themselves, more than those who burst forth.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Sensitivity is personal; expression is borrowed.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
All sensitive organisms know those states where one suffers and delights in one's suffering; but one only delights in it because one foresees its end.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Pain, like joy, is but a way of feeling, independent of the logical causes that the common person attributes to our grimaces or our smiles.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
But what does the sincerity of an attitude matter, if the attitude is beautiful?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The poet [...] should be an actor. And perhaps his performance will be better if it is not lived too deeply.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Great sorrows are silent; those of poets are abundant in words, sometimes eloquent.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[Poetry] coils with a hieratic and measured step around an idea or a feeling, like a procession around a basilica.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The Greece of today's poets is no longer classical. It is a dreamland where one goes to play with the nymphs.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Come, the sweetness of living blossoms in our thoughts.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Nothing is more difficult for a poet, that is to say for a person of great sensitivity, than pure objectivity.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
This arbitrariness is found in almost all the creations of poets.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Perhaps only Shakespeare's personality seems entirely absent from the works he created.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The artist] has been reproached for a certain coldness, which is [...] only a certain discretion. Confidences and familiarities are repugnant to his taste.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
He does not have the naivety of those poets who believe they are discovering pleasure or pain.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The artist] is [...] representative of a phase of taste, of a moment in poetic beauty.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
If one sometimes encounters, in criminal matters, facts impenetrable to human sagacity, the mystery surrounding them is a warning that they should be reserved for the judgment of God.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It would be curious to seek the origin of this singular opinion which [...] has distorted literature, art, and morals, and created that factitious being, the Young Girl.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
But even the best-constructed novels have gaps and implausibilities; genius itself does not think of everything.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
What a civilization, where an umbrella merchant is, in all possible cases, the absolute judge, the judge of life and death!
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Literature seen in perspective is not quite the same as seen day by day. [...] After a year, a book has acquired a greater or lesser value than it had on the day of its publication.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Reading ferments in the brain, like food in the stomach; — and the results are an increase in strength, or a grudge.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There is nothing like comparing the normal clock with the disordered one to understand a mechanism.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Overviews are always more or less novelistic; they are constructions. Reality is not constructed.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
In general, all known, approved, popular history is apocryphal. But it is quite probable that what replaces it is hardly more certain. Everything is possible and nothing is true.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
There are silences so deep that they speak louder than the loudest words.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Intelligence, lest it wither almost immediately, cannot be separated from sensibility, which is its root.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The Assembly [...] legislates for the abstract man, the natural man, and [...] such a variety of man does not exist: only the social man exists.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Civilization and its necessary refinements always represent decadence for the people, who are always [...] uncivilized and coarse.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
A miracle requires an air of naivety that no skill can perfectly imitate; it needs the vivid stamp of popular foolishness, representing that kind of marvelous absurdity peculiar to the imagination of crowds.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Either the King will have an army or the army will have a King; and in both hypotheses, it is the beginning of a military dictatorship.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
For a hundred years, people have tried to equate two states that have little in common: the state of love and the state of marriage.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Moralists, unable to conquer love [...], have placed it within marriage, where they were sure to dishonor and even murder it.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Love is fleeting and marriage is permanent. This feeling and this institution are almost contradictory.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Love is delightful only in its beginnings, or else one must have the genius for loving to constantly renew its fervor.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Love does not last, it renews itself. Yet, marriage opposes this renewal. Therefore, love and marriage are incompatible.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To be a lover requires special qualities, the first of which is sensitivity, that is, the aptitude for tenderness.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The bond of love emerges from the forge either strong enough to withstand all shocks or fragile enough to yield to the slightest push. It is a chance one must take [...].
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
Who can describe [...] the beauty of desire that is exalted in its own crucifixion?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
[The Don Juan] has known many women, but he has not known Woman, who never gives herself entirely at the first encounter.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
The being who gives pleasure is also the one who gives happiness, and [the true lover] knows that happiness cannot be drained like a glass of wine.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
It necessarily happens [...] that one travels the same paths so often that the leaves, the flowers, and the scents fade, pale, and diminish.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
We have not managed to achieve the synchronism of two clocks. How could we demand it of two hearts?
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
To write about love is above all to summarize one's experiences, or one's hopes [...]; it is, in a word, to tell one's own story.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
On the advantage there would be, for the cultivation of happiness, in giving women the initiative of choice in love.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)
On the three words that summarize love: to desire, to possess, to regret.
1926
Source: Literary Walks (Gourmont)