Remy de Gourmont Quotes
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Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius.
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It is well-nigh obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinities with murderers than those who oppose it.
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To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes-countrysides and figures, movements and gestures-how could he have a style, that is originality?
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Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.
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The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.
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God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.
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Man associates ideas not according to logic or verifiable exactitude, but according to his pleasure and interests. It is for this reason that most truths are nothing but prejudices.
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Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness
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Art is the accomplice of love.
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Man begins by loving love and ends by loving a woman. Woman begins by loving a man and ends by loving love.
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Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.
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To know what everyone knows is to know nothing.
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Knowledge has its end in itself, apart from any idea of life and propagation of the species.
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Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.