Life & Wisdom Quote by Theophile Gautier

Gautier’s line is a velvet-gloved provocation: a refusal to accept the bourgeois moral math that treats art, beauty, and pleasure as optional extras. By calling “superfluity” a “necessity,” he flips the economy of virtue on its head. The phrasing has the cool self-certainty of someone anticipating the eye-rolls of the practical-minded and enjoying them. It’s a manifesto compressed into a single paradox: the supposedly useless is what keeps certain people alive.

The subtext is classed, even when it pretends not to be. “Superfluity” names everything the 19th-century middle class was learning to police - ornament, idleness, sensuality, decoration, literature itself when it doesn’t instruct or uplift. Gautier positions himself among a minority (“one of those”) whose needs don’t align with productivity’s catechism. It’s not an apology for luxury so much as an insistence that aesthetic experience isn’t a guilty pleasure; it’s a condition of existence for the artist and the aesthete.

Context matters: Gautier sits near the ignition point of l’art pour l’art, pushing back against the era’s demand that art justify itself through politics, morality, or social utility. The sentence works because it’s both defiant and intimate. He doesn’t argue; he confesses, and in that confession he dares the reader to admit their own hungers. In a culture obsessed with function, he makes “extra” sound like oxygen.