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Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes & Sayings

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Famous Quotes By Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 457118

He did not affirm the revolting conception of original sin, nor did he feel inclined to argue that it is a beneficent God who protects the worthless and wicked, rains misfortunes on children, stultifies the aged and afflicts the innocent. He did not exalt the virtues of a Providence which has invented that useless, incomprehensible, unjust and senseless abomination, physical suffering. Far from seeking to justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: If a God has made this world, I should not wish to be that God. The world's wretchedness would rend my heart. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 641431

Still, more than all the implausible fluff, it was the advertisements-neat, clean, set off in a box in the middle of some mendacious tale-that were ductile for dreaming. However much it smacked of that hyperbole necessary for sales purposes, he nonetheless remained astounded and tickled by the imperturbable guarantee in the announcement of a product that existed, that could be bought, a product which was not, in sum, the figment of a journalist's imagination, a ruse invented for the sake of a byline. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1468336

Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1073068

Life is an unpleasant business. I have resolved to spend it reflecting on it. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1325096

There's no doubt about it - gardeners are the only true artists these days. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1939289

Outside the snow was falling. In the lamplight icy leaf-patterns could be seen glittering on the blue-black windows, and hoar-frost sparkled like melted sugar in the hollows of the bottle-glass panes, all splattered with gold.
The little house, lying snug and sleepy in the darkness, was wrapped in a deep silence. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 243126

Last comes the class of persons, of nervous organization and enfeebled vigour, whose sensual appetite craves highly seasoned dishes, men of a hectic, over-stimulated constitution. Their eyes almost invariably hanker after that most irritating and morbid of colours, with its artificial splendours and feverish acrid gleams,-orange. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 604280

Last but not least, he hated with all the hatred that was in him the rising generation, the appalling boors who find it necessary to talk and laugh at the top of their voices in restaurants and cafes, who jostle you in the street without a word of apology, and who, without expressing or even indicating regret, drive the wheels of a baby-carriage into your legs. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1965381

His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with any author or scholar. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1637875

The pleasure of travel - existing as it largely does only in recollection and almost never in the present, at the actual moment when it is taking place-
Besides, he considered travel to be pointless, believing that the imagination could easily compensate for the vulgar reality of actual experience. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1159613

He shrunk more and more from the realities of life and above all from the society of his day which he regarded with an ever growing horror,
a detestation which had reacted strongly on his literary and artistic tastes; he refused, as far as possible, to have anything to do with pictures and books whose subjects were in any way connected with modern existence. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 2139740

Indeed it is very true that, just as the finest air in the world is vulgarized beyond all bearing once the public has taken to hum it and the street organs to play it, so the work of art that has appealed to the sham connoisseurs, that is admired by the uncritical, that is not content to rouse the enthusiasm of only a chosen few, becomes for this very reason, in the eyes of the elect, a thing polluted, commonplace, almost repulsive. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1844427

And whenever they came back to his lips, these exquisite, funereal laments conjured up, in his mind, a place on the outskirts of a city, a mean and voiceless place where silently, in the distance, lines of men and women, wearied and bowed down by life, were disappearing into the twilight, while he himself, surfeited with bitterness and replete with disgust, felt himself alone, utterly alone, in the midst of a tearful Nature, overwhelmed by an inexpressible melancholy, by a relentless anguish, the mysterious intensity of which precluded all consolation, all pity, all repose. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1829659

And, indeed, just as the most charming tune in the world becomes vulgar, intolerable, as soon as the general public is humming it, as soon as the street - organs have taken it up, the work for which charlatan art fanciers do not remain indifferent, the work which nitwits do not challenge, which is not satisfied with arousing the enthusiasm of the few, also becomes, by virtue of that very fact, corrupted, banal, almost repellent to the initiated. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1808595

And then he experienced an inexplicable confusion of thoughts, like a rosary of ideas comprised of diverse and ingenious beads that had unraveled and was now rattling around in his brain with no thread linking them, no coherence. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1590821

Ah; but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! - Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illumined no longer by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1794276

Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1741392

The belief that man is an irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces of equal strength, alternately winning and losing the battle for his soul; the conviction that human life is nothing more than an uncertain struggle between heaven and hell; the faith in two opposed entities, Satan and Christ - all this was bound to engender those internal discords in which the soul, excited by the incessant fighting, stimulated as it were by the constant promises and threats, ends up by giving in and prostitutes itself to whichever of the two combatants has been more obstinate in its pursuit. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1577921

It was still quite motionless and he felt it with his fingers; it was dead. Accustomed, no doubt, to an uneventful existence, to a humble life spent beneath its poor carapace, it had not been able to bear the dazzling splendor thrust upon it, the glittering cope in which it had been garbed, the gems with which its back had been encrusted, like a ciborium. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1676011

He wanted, in short, a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion, the causes of which he would strive to patiently and even vainly to analyse. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1598412

The soul is pained by all things it thinks upon. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1660425

Art is the only clean thing on earth, except holiness. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1658166

At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterous deceptions, he had said not a word of these childish maladies, but had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1647691

The only people who are worth knowing are either saints, scoundrels or madmen; at least their conversation is always interesting. Sensible people are dull by definition, because they are always harping on to the same boring tune about everyday life. They form part of the crowd, the more intelligent part perhaps, but the crowd for all that, and I'm sick of them. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 2040215

Outside, the rain was still falling steadily; he could hear it pattering on the glass skylight at the far end of the room and cascading into the water-spouts. Inside, no one stirred; all were dozing like himself over their liqueur glasses, pleasantly conscious that they were in the dry. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 77705

In the matter of animals I love only cats, but I love them unreasonably for their qualities and in spite of their numerous faults. I have only one, but I could not live without a cat. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 2139305

No longer was she merely the dancing-girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body; who breaks the will, masters the mind of a King by the spectacle of her quivering bosoms, heaving belly and tossing thighs; she was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles, - a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 2107661

Speaking of dust, 'out of which we came and to which we shall return,' do you know that after we are dead our corpses are devoured by different kinds of worms according as we are fat or thin? In fat corpses one species of maggot is found, the rhizophagus, while thin corpses are patronized only by the phora. The latter is evidently the aristocrat, the fastidious gourmet which turns up its nose at a heavy meal of copious breasts and juicy at bellies. Just think, there is no perfect equality, even in the manner in which we feed the worms. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 2101241

Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 2100223

Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay, and whoever does not settle it here below, defrays it after death; happiness is only lent, and must be repaid; its very phantoms are like duties paid in advance on a future succession of sorrows. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 2096503

He realized at last that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 2082070

I seek new perfumes, ampler blossoms, untried pleasures. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 2074205

One of these, bearing the name of Crampton, is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, a long slender body imprisoned in a shiny brass corset, and supple catlike movements; a smart golden blonde whose extraordinary grace can be quite terrifying when she stiffens her muscles of steel, sends the sweat pouring down her steaming flanks, sets her elegant wheels spinning in their wide circles, and hurtles away, full of life, at the head of an express or a boat-train.
The other, Engerth by name, is a strapping saturnine brunette given to uttering raucous, guttural cries, with a thickset figure encased in armor-plating of cast iron; a monstrous creature with her disheveled mane of black smoke and her six wheels coupled together low down, she gives an indication of her fantastic strength when, with an effort that shakes the very earth, she slowly and deliberately drags along her heavy train of goods-wagons. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1861892

It was here that she was indeed Woman, for here she gave rein to her ardent and cruel temperament. She was living, more refined and savage, more execrable and exquisite. She more energetically awakened the dulled senses of man, more surely bewitched and subdued his power of will, with the charm of a tall venereal flower, on sacrilegious beds, in impious hothouses. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 2038523

Now God refused to come down to earth in the form of potato-flour; that was an undeniable, indisputable fact. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 2027992

The only really indecent people are the chaste. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 2008977

Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things. It was possible, in his opinion, to gratify the most extravagant, absurd desires by a subtle subterfuge, by a slight modification of the object of one's wishes. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1995421

If Baudelaire, in hieroglyphics of the soul, had deciphered the return of the age of the sentiment and ideas, Poe, in the field of morbid psychology had more especially investigated the domain of the soul. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1951459

Now it was all over. Once it had done its job, the plebs had been bled white in the interests of public hygiene, while the jovial bourgeois lorded it over the country, putting his trust in the power of his money and the contagiousness of his stupidity. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1881938

He cared little for commonly experienced emotions, for everyday associations of ideas, now that the closing of his mind had grown more pronounced, and he allowed access only to the most highly refined sensations, to crises of faith and to violent disorders of the senses. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1877957

This landscape of abomination is in a state of flux. Gilles now sees that the trunks are covered in frightful tumours and goitres. He observes exostosis and ulcers, pustulent sores the size of rocks, tubercular chancres, atrocious caries. It is a vegetal leper house, an aboreal venereal clinic in which, at a turn in the path, there stands a copper beech.
And as he stands beneath those crimson leaves, he feels that he is being drenched in a shower of blood; and imagining that a wood nymph lives under the bark, he becomes enraged; he wants to fumble in the flesh of a goddess, massacre the Dryad, violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 909281

Literature, in fact, had been concerned with virtues and vices of a perfectly healthy sort, the regular functioning of brains of a normal conformation, the practical reality of current ideas, with never a thought for morbid depravities and other-worldly aspirations; in short, the discoveries of these anaylists of human nature stopped short at the speculations good or bad, classified by the church; their efforts amounted to no more than the humdrum researches of a botanist who watches closely the expected development of ordinary flora planted in common or garden soil. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 125686

He found he was now incapable of understanding a single word of the volumes he consulted; his very eyes stopped reading, and it seemed as if his mind, gorged with literature and art, refused to absorb any more. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 128776

How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 132821

... he noticed that the free thinkers, the doctrinaires of the bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they might stifle the opinions of others, were greedy and shameless puritans whom, in education, he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 158932

Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God ... It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 166009

And if it be true that the loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own, the work of art which does not remain indifferent to the spurious artists, which is not contested by fools, and which is not satisfied with awakening the enthusiasm of the few, by this very fact becomes profaned, trite, almost repulsive to the initiate.
This promiscuity in admiration, furthermore, was one of the greatest sources of regret in his life. Incomprehensible successes had forever spoiled for him many pictures and books once cherished and dear. Approved by the mob, they began to reveal imperceptible defects to him, and he rejected them, wondering meanwhile if his perceptions were not growing blunted. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 261693

Like a tide-race, the waves of human mediocrity are rising to the heavens and will engulf this refuge, for I am opening the flood-gates myself, against my will. Ah! but my courage fails me and my heart is sick within me!
Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope!
(A Rebours, final words) — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 402620

Go forth more boldly, look at things more widely, pray as best you can, and do not trouble yourself. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 435200

The loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 471971

But that which remains for ever incomprehensible is the initial horror, the horror imposed on each of us, of having to live, and that is a mystery no philosophy can explain. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 549399

Only the chaste are truly obscene. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 580345

In this game he had acquired a great deal of muddled knowledge, more than one approximation and less than one certitude. And absence of energy, a curiosity that was too sharp to be crushed immediately, a lack of order in his ideas, a weakening of his spiritual boundaries, which were promptly twisted, an excessive passion for running along forked roads and wearying of the path as soon as he had started on it, mental indigestion demanding varied dishes, quickly tiring of the foods he desired, digesting almost all, but badly, was his state. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 593001

Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 752600

As he was wont to remark, Nature has had her day; she has finally exhausted through the nauseating uniformity of her landscapes and her skies, the sedulous patience of men of refined taste. Essentially, what triteness Nature displays, like a specialist who confines himself to his own single sphere; what small-mindedness, like a shopkeeper who stocks only this one article to the exclusion of any other; what monotony she exhibits with her arrangements of mountains and seas! Page 20.
There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artifice. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 765288

Goya's savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 859172

That moment of grace mentioned by Lacordaire, when the last shaft of light penetrates the soul and unites the truths there lying dispersed. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1543330

There are two ways of ridding ourselves of a thing which burdens us, casting it away or letting it fall. To cast away requires an effort of which we may not be capable, to let fall imposes no labour, is simpler, without peril, within reach of all. To cast away, again, implies a certain interest, a certain animation, even a certain fear; to let fall is absolute indifference, absolute contempt; believe me, use this method, and Satan will flee. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1020659

The heart, said to be man's noblest organ, has the same shape as the penis, commonly supposed the most ignoble; the symbolism is not inappropriate, because the love which comes from the heart soon extends to the organ which it resembles. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1060359

He was searching his memory when suddenly a strange figure appeared in front of them, on horseback, trotted for a moment, then turned round in the saddle. His blood froze; he remained rooted to the spot in horror. That equivocal, sexless face was green, with terrible eyes of an icy light blue beneath purple lids; postules encircled its mouth; extraordinarily thin arms, bare from the elbows down and shaking with fever, emerged from ragged sleeves, and the fleshless thighs shivered in high boots which were far too large.
The dreadful gaze was fixed on Des Esseintes, boring into him, chilling him to the marrow, while the bulldog woman, now in even greater panic, clung to him with her head thrown back on her rigid neck, screaming blue murder. And instantly he grasped the meaning of the horrifying vision. He was looking at the figure of the Pox. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1060921

I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove ... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1084594

Daydream is the only good thing in life. Everything else is vulgar and empty. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1102488

What I want to do is to teach a lesson to all these people ... I want [to prove] that the Devil exists, that the Devil reigns supreme, that the power he enjoyed in the Middle Ages has not been taken from him, for today he is the absolute master of the world. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1152520

Menacing lines of black tomorrows on the horizon. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1216119

Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1284176

It was snowing. In the lamplight, blades of ice were growing on the outside of the blue-tinged window-panes and the hoarfroast, like melted sugar, glittered on the gold-spangled bottle-glass of the windows. Absolute silence enveloped the little house as it slumbered in the shadows.
Des Esseintes let his mind wander ... Like some great hanging of reverse ermine, the sky rose before him, black and dappled with white. An icy wind gusted, intensifying the wild scudding of the snow, inverting the proportions of black and white. The heraldic hanging of the sky turned itself over, becoming true white ermine, itself dappled with black by the tiny patches of night strewn among the snowflakes. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1432624

I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves of
human mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whose
dams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity the
Christian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict of
life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by
the consoling beacons of ancient faith. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1434411

Curious, a man's affection for the object that he manipulates. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1440203

The modern painter ... is an excellent couturier — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1467927

His scorn of humanity grew by what it fed on; he realized in fact that the world is mostly made up of solemn humbugs and silly idiots.There was no room for doubt; he could entertain no hope of discovering in another the same aspirations and the same antipa- thies, no hope of joining forces with a mind that, like his own, should find its satisfaction in a life of studious idleness; no hope of uniting a keen and doctrinaire spirit such as his, with that of a writer and a man of learning. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1493613

He did not believe, and yet he admitted the supernatural. Right here on earth how could any of us deny that we are hemmed in by mystery, in our homes, in the street, - everywhere when we came to think of it? — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1536700

But," thought Durtal, "seeing that there are so many more things betwixt heaven and earth than are dreamed of in anybody's philosophy, why not believe in the Trinity? Why reject the divinity of Christ? It is no strain on one to admit the Credo quia absurdum of Saint Augustine and Tertullian and say that if the supernatural were comprehensible it would not be supernatural, and that precisely because it passes the faculties of man it is divine. "And - oh, — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes 1537623

And yet the point of view from which his ideas on art had sprung was a simple one: for him, literary schools did not exist; the only thing that mattered was the temperament of the artist; the only thing of interest was the way his brain worked, regardless of the subject he was treating. — Joris-Karl Huysmans