Quotes by Remy de Gourmont

If need be, he would actually oppose such a course: this has happened. Modesty is a timid confession of pride. The ill are always optimistic. Perhaps optimism itself is an illness. There is a simulation of intelligence, just as there is a simulation of virtue. Mr. X used to say: "Some people need a great deal in order to retain a little; as for me, I need a little to retain a great deal." Science is worth what the scientist is worth. Scholars spread the rumor that science is impersonal. Scholars? They are scholars as much as the masons are architects. The people may make uprisings; but revolutions, never. Revolutions always come from above. Descartes wrote to Balzac: "Every day I walk amidst an immense people, almost as tranquilly as you may walk in your lanes. The men I meet produce upon me the same impression as if I were gazing upon the trees of your forests or the flocks of your country-side." All the weakness of the metaphysicians is explained by these two scornful sentences. In order to understand life it is not only necessary not to be indifferent to men, but not to be indifferent to flocks, to trees. One should be indifferent to nothing. The superstition which, among the ancients, caused them to look upon new-born weaklings, lame, blind and hunchbacked infants, as tokens of divine anger, and to sacrifice them, was happier than the religious or scientific sentimentality that tolerates them, brings them up, making of them half-men and introducing eternal germs of decrepitude among the race. Pity is perhaps at bottom only cowardice. We pity only ourselves or those whom we fear. Nietzsche stupefies. Why? Calm reflection will show that he almost always expresses common-sense truths. Nietzsche was a revealer, in the new photographic sense. Contact with his work has brought to light truths that were slumbering in men's minds. Happiness, like wealth, has its parasites. One does not dwell in a house; one dwells in himself. Put a pig in a palace and he'll make a pen of it. Paul Bourget still believes in duchesses. What is there astonishing about that? There are many people who believe in ghosts.

The lie is only the psychological form of the Vertebrate's reaction against its environment. Nietzsche, anticipating science, says: "The lie is a condition of life." [4] There is a presentiment of this in Montesquieu's remark, recently published; it is conformity that constitutes beauty _Æsthetics_. Father Buffier has defined beauty as the assembling of the commonest elements. When his definition is explained, it is excellent. Father Buffier says that beautiful eyes are those resembling the greatest number of other eyes; the same with the mouth, the nose, etc. It is not that there are not a great many more ugly noses than beautiful ones, but that the former are of many different sorts, and that each sort of ugly noses is much smaller in number than the beautiful sort. It is as if, in a crowd of a hundred men, there were ten dressed each in a different colour; it is the green that would predominate. THE VALUE OF EDUCATION Without being as widespread as it might be, and as it will be, education is very, much in vogue. We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility surrenders to intelligence. I have seen a man laughed at because he examined a dead leaf attentively and with pleasure. No one would have laughed to hear a string of botanical terms muttered with regard to it; but there are some men who, while not ignorant of the handbooks, believe that true science should be felt first as a pleasure. It is not the fashion. The fashion is to learn in books alone, and from the lips of those who recite books. Cornelius Agrippa, who possessed all the learning of his time, and more, amused himself by writing a "Paradox on the uncertainty, vanity, and abuse of the sciences."[1] This might be rewritten to-day, but on another note. For a science does not have to be uncertain, vain and abusive in order to be useless to one who cultivates it; and, on the other hand, the certainty of a science, its interest and its legitimacy, do not confer upon it an absolute right to mental governance. We would even gladly agree as to the absurdity of a debate upon the certainty or uncertainty of the sciences.