Love Quote by Remy de Gourmont

Aesthetic rapture loosens the grip of utility and defense. When the senses are heightened by beauty, attention grows supple, the ego thins, and the body is tuned for receptivity. From that openness, erotic feeling can enter more readily. The gallery, the concert hall, the poem on the page all train perception to dwell, to linger, to crave the next note or curve or word. Art becomes the accomplice of love because it rehearses desire: the delay, the approach, the surge, the surrender.

Remy de Gourmont, a fin-de-siecle symbolist who wrote both literary criticism and The Natural Philosophy of Love, treated eros not as a crude appetite but as a principle of life and form. His world prized suggestion over declaration, the shimmer of association over blunt fact. In that climate, the tie between aesthetic emotion and erotic emotion becomes almost anatomical: the same pathways of attention and resonance, the same quickening pulse. To call art an accomplice is to grant it agency in seduction; it conspires with love to make us vulnerable to beauty and to one another.

The final claim is deliberately sweeping: take love away and there is no longer art. Read less as a testable thesis than as a poetic axiom about motive force. Creation springs from desire, whether for a person, an ideal, a lost time, or the sheer rightness of a line. Even the most austere abstraction is underwritten by a devotion to form. What of art born of anger or grief? It, too, is animated by love for what has been harmed or taken, a fierce attachment to justice or memory.

The insight is double-edged and generous. To cultivate art is to cultivate the capacity for love; to love is to feel the world become vivid, layered with nuance and rhythm. That quickened perception is the common ground where beauty and desire meet and help each other do their work.