Daily Inspiration Quote by Remy de Gourmont

A novelist’s complaint about machines is never just about machines; it’s about who gets to live a meaningful life when the work is stripped of craft, pride, and bargaining power. Remy de Gourmont’s line lands like a provocation because it flips the usual moral ledger. War is the obvious villain, but he’s insisting the quieter violence of “industry” can be worse: it rearranges society every day, permanently, and often without anyone consenting.

The first sentence is a compact class anatomy. “Artisan” signals skill, identity, and autonomy; “idler” is the rentier, the person whose income isn’t tethered to effort. Gourmont isn’t romanticizing poverty so much as spotlighting a new imbalance: industrialization rewards ownership and passivity (capital) over production and participation (labor). That “also” matters. He’s not making one grievance; he’s stacking them to show a system: the same engine that displaces the craft worker also fattens the investor.

Then comes the deliberately outrageous comparison: any mechanical invention more harmful than a century of war. He’s using hyperbole as a diagnostic tool. War is episodic; technology is cumulative. One invention doesn’t just kill; it reorganizes time, attention, wages, cities, family life. The subtext is that progress has been sold as neutral and inevitable, when it’s actually a political choice disguised as engineering.

In Gourmont’s fin-de-siecle context, this is a warning flare from inside modernity’s first great acceleration: when the factory, the corporation, and mass production turned “efficiency” into a moral alibi.