Joris-Karl Huysmans quotes

Joris-Karl Huysmans was a French novelist and art critic known for his decadent and naturalist literature. He gained fame for his novel "Against Nature," which explores themes of aestheticism and decadence. Huysmans was a key figure in the fin de siècle literary movement and influenced writers such as Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust. Learn more about this influential author and his works by exploring our collection of Huysmans' writings.

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

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

- Joris-Karl Huysmans

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

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

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

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