Daily Inspiration Quote by Remy de Gourmont

Gourmont slips a scalpel under the polite myth that people believe what they believe because the evidence led them there. He argues the opposite: association comes first, justification later. We connect ideas the way we arrange a room, not the way we solve an equation - by comfort, taste, and what serves our sense of self. The line is less a lament about human stupidity than a diagnosis of how culture actually runs: through affinity, not proof.

Calling "most truths" prejudices is deliberately inflammatory, but it has a precise target. He is taking aim at the social prestige of Truth with a capital T - the kind that arrives prepackaged as common sense, national character, moral certainty, or scientific inevitability. If our mental filing system is built on pleasure and interest, then many "truths" are simply the stories that flatter our group, protect our habits, and keep our anxieties manageable. They feel true because they fit.

The subtext is aesthetic as much as epistemological. As a fin-de-siecle French novelist and critic, Gourmont wrote in a moment obsessed with the instability of knowledge: positivism on one side, symbolist and decadent skepticism on the other, plus the political paranoia of the Dreyfus era where "facts" were routinely swallowed or spat out based on identity. His sentence works because it sounds like a cool aphorism while smuggling a hard challenge: if your beliefs track your interests, then sincerity is not innocence - it's evidence.