Daily Inspiration Quote by Remy de Gourmont

Truth is sold as a clean reward: climb the mountain, get the view, feel redeemed. De Gourmont flips that romance into a warning. The “terrible thing” isn’t the search, with all its noble struggle and self-fashioning, but the moment the search succeeds. Finding truth ends the story you were telling yourself. It collapses comforting ambiguities, the little fictions that let you keep multiple versions of your life running at once. In that sense, the line is less about epistemology than about appetite: we claim to want truth, but we often want the chase - the moral drama of being a seeker - more than the answer.

The phrasing works because it weaponizes inevitability. “The quest for truth” sounds heroic, even sanctified; “you find it” is flat, almost comic, like the punchline to a joke that’s been hiding in plain sight. That deadpan turn carries a cynical insight: truth, once caught, can be socially and personally disruptive. It makes you accountable. It strips away excuses. It forces choices.

Placed in de Gourmont’s fin-de-siecle context - a Europe anxious about science, secularization, and the erosion of inherited certainties - the line reads as an indictment of modernity’s bravado. Progress promised illumination; de Gourmont suggests illumination can feel like exposure. The terror isn’t ignorance. It’s what knowledge obliges you to do next.