Quotes by Joris-Karl Huysmans

About Joris-Karl Huysmans:

Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans is most famous for the novel À rebours (1884, published in English as Against the Grain or Against Nature). He supported himself by a 30-year career in the French civil service.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Menacing lines of black tomorrows on the horizon.

Joris-Karl Huysmans

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...

Joris-Karl Huysmans

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

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 illum...

Joris-Karl Huysmans

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 wo...

Joris-Karl Huysmans

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 sor...

Joris-Karl Huysmans

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

Joris-Karl Huysmans

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

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

Le démon ne peut rien sur la volonté, très peu sur l'intelligence et tout sur l'imagination.

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

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

Life is an unpleasant business. I have resolved to spend it reflecting on it.

Joris-Karl Huysmans

Author Bio

  • NameJoris-Karl Huysmans
  • DescriptionFrench novelist and art critic
  • BornFebruary 5, 1848
  • DiedMay 12, 1907
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionWriter; Art Critic; Novelist
  • AwardsOfficer Of The Legion Of Honour; Knight Of The Legion Of Honour