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 HuysmansRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote explores deeper emotional wounds beyond romantic disappointments, focusing on the existential suffering of disillusionment and despair.
Joris-Karl Huysmans critiques the superficial portrayal of grief in literature, emphasizing that many suffer from feelings of emptiness, disillusionment, and contempt. He believes that the true struggles lie not in the trivialities of love but in the profound discontent with one's existence, battling with the past failures and an uncertain future. This perspective highlights a more complex understanding of human suffering and the psychological depth of despair.
Themes
GriefDisillusionmentExistentialismSufferingSatiety
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on existential philosophy, one could use this quote to illustrate the depth of human suffering.
More from Joris-Karl Huysmans
All quotes →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 HuysmansRead
Similar quotes
The answer is, of course, that it would be best to be both loved and feared. But since the two rarely come together, anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved.
Niccolo MachiavelliRead
The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.
Hilary MantelRead
The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?
Jeanette WintersonRead
Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?
Marcel ProustRead
Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.
George SaundersRead
We are fascinated by the darkness in ourselves, we are fascinated by the shadow, we are fascinated by the bogeyman.
Anthony HopkinsRead