62 Quotes by Joris-Karl Huysmans

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.

…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.

Vraiment, quand j'y songe, la littérature n'a qu'une raison d'être, sauver celui qui la fait du dégoût de vivre!

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.

The only really indecent people are the chaste.

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.

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

Art is the only clean thing on earth, except holiness.

Only the chaste are truly obscene.