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Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes

Joris-Karl Huysmans quote from classy quote

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 Devil God Mysticism Occultism Positivism Religion Satanism

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 Church Religion

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 Courage Religion Skeptic

I marvel at the placidity of the Utopian who imagines that man is perfectible. There is no denying that the human creature is born selfish, abusive, vile. Just look around you and see. Society cynical and ferocious, the humble heckled and pillaged by the rich traffickers in necessities. Everywhere the triumph of the mediocre and unscrupulous, everywhere the apotheosis of crooked politics and finance. And you think you can make any progress against a stream like that? No, man has never changed. His soul was corrupt in the days of Genesis and is not less rotten at present. Only the form of his sins varies. Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.

~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Change Corrupt Corruption Crooked Cynical Cynicism Finance Humble Hypocrisy Man Mankind Mediocre Mediocrity Perfectibility Perfectible Pillage Placidity Politics Progress Rotten Selfish Selfishness Sin Sins Society Soul Triumph Unscrupulous Utopia Utopian Vice Vices Vile

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 Art Mystery Realism Supernatural

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 Art Criticism Goya Life

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 Humanity Machine Nature

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 Heart Love Noble Penis Sex

To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.

~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Abject Abjectness Abominable Charms Chaste Chastity Death Distance Dream Empty Emptyness Eternal Existence Heaven Hope Hopelessness Ignoble Imagination Kiss Kisses Life Love Pale Pessimism Pessimist Possess Skeptic Skepticism Unreal World

Menacing lines of black tomorrows on the horizon.

~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Future Tomorrow

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 Life Literature

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 Depression Incompatibility Loathing Lonesome

Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul.

~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Art Prayer

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 Happiness Suffering

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 Boring Crowd Life Madness People

I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves ofhuman mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whosedams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity theChristian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict oflife embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined bythe consoling beacons of ancient faith.

~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans Courage Faiths Mediocrity Paris Sceptic
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