Thread by @rebeca6169

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

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

"Only the chaste are truly obscene."

~ Joris-Karl Huysmans 💎 #Botd 1848

Joris-Karl Huysmans (5 February 1848 – 12 May 1907) was a French novelist and art critic, most famous for the novel À rebours (1884, published in English as Against the Grain or Against Nature). He supported himself by way of a 30-year career in the French civil service.

Huysmans' work is considered remarkable for its idiosyncratic use of the French language,large vocabulary, descriptions, satirical wit and far-ranging erudition. First considered part of Naturalism,he became associated with the decadent movement with his publication of À rebours.

Huysmans’ work expressed his deep pessimism, which had led him to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. In later years, his novels reflected his study of Catholicism, religious conversion, and becoming an oblate.

Huysmans discussed the iconography of Christian architecture at length in La cathédrale (1898), set at Chartres and with its cathedral as the focus of the book. It was his most commercially successful work. Its profits enabled Huysmans to retire from his civil service job.

Là-bas, En route, and La cathédrale are a trilogy that feature Durtal, an autobiographical character whose spiritual progress is tracked and who converts to Catholicism. In the novel that follows, L'Oblat, Durtal becomes an oblate in a monastery, as Huysmans himself was.

"There's no doubt about it - gardeners are the only true artists these days."
~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

Thanks @PowayPatrick17

"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."
~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

"[Baudelaire] had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. ...

near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind-the mysterious tetanus,the burning fever of lust,the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime-he had found,hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui,the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.

"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

"The belief that man is an irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces...heaven and hell...all this...ends up by giving in and prostitutes itself to whichever of the two combatants has been more obstinate in its pursuit."
~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

"In this game he had acquired a great deal of muddled knowledge, more than one approximation and less than one certitude. And absence of energy, a curiosity that was too sharp to be crushed immediately, a lack of order in his ideas, a weakening of his spiritual boundaries... JKH

"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

"...he shrunk more and more from the realities of life and above all from the society of his day which he regarded with an ever growing horror,--a detestation which had reacted strongly on his literary and artistic tastes..."
~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

"Menacing lines of black tomorrows on the horizon."

"He realized at last that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him"

~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

"At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love...he had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls..." JKH

"The modern painter…is an excellent couturier"
~ 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

"The loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own."
~ 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 illumined no longer by...hope." JKH

"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

"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