Wit & Attitude Quote by Remy de Gourmont

“Simple ideas” aren’t being praised here as the natural product of plain thinking; they’re being framed as an achievement, almost a luxury item, available only to minds that have already done the hard work of wrestling with complexity. Gourmont flips the usual democratic romance of simplicity. In his formulation, simplicity isn’t where you start; it’s where you arrive after you’ve metabolized contradictions, discarded false certainty, and learned which details don’t matter.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the culture of easy maxims. Anyone can produce a slogan, a moral, a hot take that feels clean. The difficult part is distillation: naming a principle that’s spare without being simplistic, usable without being dishonest. That’s why the line stings. It suggests that many “simple ideas” circulating in public life are counterfeit versions of simplicity - the rhetorical equivalent of smooth stones that have never been weathered.

Context matters: Gourmont wrote in fin-de-siecle France, when Symbolism, decadence, and a broader modernist anxiety were challenging inherited narratives about truth and taste. As a novelist and critic associated with merciless intellectual scrutiny, he’d have been suspicious of bourgeois clarity presented as virtue. The sentence carries that skepticism: if your idea feels simple, ask whether it’s the clean result of complexity mastered, or merely complexity avoided.

The intent isn’t elitism for its own sake; it’s a standard. Earn your simplicity. If you can’t explain it plainly, you may not understand it. If you can explain it plainly too quickly, you may not understand it either.