Philosophic Nights in Paris: Being Selections from Promenades Philosophiques
1920
Philosophic Nights in Paris: Being Selections from Promenades Philosophiques
1920
Translated by Isaac Goldberg
Paris after midnight. A writer walks. These are the thoughts that emerge from his nocturnal wanderings: on happiness and its elusiveness, on free will and its illusions, on the nature of perception and how it constructs the world we inhabit. Remy de Gourmont, the great forgotten voice of French Symbolism, offers not a system but a series of philosophical vignettes, fragments of meditation的最佳状态 that ripple with insight and doubt. Here is philosophy as lived experience rather than abstract treatise. De Gourmont probes the human condition with elegant skepticism, questioning whether we ever truly master our own minds or merely drift through consciousness, constructing meaning as we go. His meditation on happiness is particularly striking: he suggests that contentment requires a kind of deliberate blindness, a selective attention that shields us from the chaos beneath the surface of ordinary life. These essays, written in the early twentieth century but timeless in their concerns, appeal to readers who find beauty in uncertainty and who prefer illumination over explanation. For those who cherish Montaigne's essays, the later existentialists, or any writer who thinks in aperçus rather than arguments, this book offers entry into a genuinely original mind.
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“The little girl expects no declaration of tenderness from her doll. She loves it, & that's all. It is thus that we should love.””
— Remy de Gourmont
“Chastity is the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.””
— Remy de Gourmont
“The man of genius may dwell unknown, but one always may recognize the path he has followed into the forest. It was a giant who passed that way. The branches are broken at a height that other men cannot reach.””
— Remy de Gourmont
“Those men who live with the greatest intensity are often the ones who seem to take least interest in life.””
— Remy de Gourmont
“Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.””
— Remy de Gourmont
“As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.””
— Remy de Gourmont
“It was an accident that has endowed man with intelligence. He has made use of it: he invented stupidity.””
— Remy de Gourmont
“Intelligence is perhaps but a malady, -a beautiful malady; the oysters's pearl.””
— Remy de Gourmont
“To ameliorate & raise the standard of the workingmen to the bourgeois level, is perhaps to create a race of slaves content with their lot,-a cast of comfortable Pariahs.””
— Remy de Gourmont
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Gourmont, Remy de. Philosophic Nights in Paris: Being Selections from Promenades Philosophiques. Lex, lex-books.com/book/philosophic-nights-in-paris-being-selections-from-promenades-philosophiques-06f6c0a7-5838-4b95-80c5-37dc67cd0285.Gourmont, R. D. (1920). Philosophic Nights in Paris: Being Selections from Promenades Philosophiques. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/philosophic-nights-in-paris-being-selections-from-promenades-philosophiques-06f6c0a7-5838-4b95-80c5-37dc67cd0285Gourmont, Remy de. Philosophic Nights in Paris: Being Selections from Promenades Philosophiques. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/philosophic-nights-in-paris-being-selections-from-promenades-philosophiques-06f6c0a7-5838-4b95-80c5-37dc67cd0285.
