Daily Inspiration Quote by Remy de Gourmont

Chastity, in Remy de Gourmont's hands, isn’t a virtue; it’s a freakish outlier dressed up as moral hygiene. The barb lands because it reverses the usual diagnostic gaze. Instead of pathologizing desire, he pathologizes its refusal, slotting abstinence into the same clinical-sounding category - “sexual aberrations” - that bourgeois society reserved for anything non-normative. The trick is tonal: he borrows the language of science and psychiatry, then aims it at the social ideal those institutions often helped sanctify. That inversion is the point.

De Gourmont wrote in a fin-de-siecle France obsessed with decadence, hygiene, degeneration theory, and the policing of bodies. “Peculiar” is doing quiet work here: it implies not heroism but rarity, a statistical oddity. In a culture where chastity is sold as natural, especially for women, calling it an aberration exposes how much effort - religious discipline, social surveillance, fear - is required to make it look effortless. The subtext: if sexuality is a basic human current, then total abstention isn’t purity; it’s an engineered posture.

There’s also a novelist’s cynicism in the phrasing. Chastity becomes a performance with narrative utility: it creates tension, authority, and social capital. By framing it as deviant, Gourmont pokes at the economy of respectability itself, suggesting that what a culture calls “normal” often isn’t nature at all, but a carefully rewarded act of refusal.