Daily Inspiration Quote by Remy de Gourmont

The line lands like a polite knife: it flatters the reader by making incomprehension feel like sophistication. De Gourmont, a Symbolist-era novelist and critic, is sketching an aesthetic and a social tactic at once. The bore is the person who floods the room with information, mistaking exhaustiveness for intimacy. The pleasing talker, by contrast, practices a calibrated omission: not vagueness for its own sake, but a deliberate gap that invites the listener to complete the meaning.

That last pivot - "not understood, but divined" - is the whole program. Understanding is mechanical; it treats language like a container you can unpack. Divination is participatory, almost erotic: the listener becomes co-author, leaning in, projecting, interpreting. De Gourmont is defending suggestion over statement, the Symbolist preference for resonance rather than report. He is also diagnosing how charisma works. People like what lets them feel smart. To "say just enough" is to give your audience the pleasure of discovery without forcing them to do the unglamorous labor of actually knowing.

The subtext is quietly elitist and quietly modern. It assumes a world where surplus talk is cheap and attention is the scarce currency. It also anticipates contemporary media manners: the teaser, the vibe, the carefully curated ambiguity that keeps people scrolling, arguing, and filling in blanks. De Gourmont is warning, and winking: clarity may be honest, but it rarely seduces.