Remy de Gourmont

“The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation.”

“Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”

“There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.”

“To be simple is the best thing in the world.”

“Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.”

“A book is a suicide postponed.”

“Chastity is the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.”

“Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it is simply a brutality.”

“Man is a blind, witless, low-brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth.”

“An opinion is a methodical creation of the memory.”

“To write is to think, and to write well is to think well.”

“Life is a perpetual modification of the same molecule.”

“Very simple ideas lie within the reach of very complicated minds.”

“What is a writer? A man who is incapable of doing anything else.”

“Love is a phenomenon of psychic osmosis.”