Daily Inspiration Quote by Remy de Gourmont

Desire turns the senses into a biased jury, and de Gourmont knows it. "The woman who loves always smells good" isn’t a hygiene tip; it’s a sly claim about perception: love doesn’t just soften judgment, it rewires it. Smell is the most primitive, involuntary of the senses, tied to memory and instinct. By choosing scent instead of sight, he sidesteps the polite, aesthetic language of beauty and goes straight for the bodily truth of attraction. The line implies that eros is a kind of alchemy: affection transforms the beloved into something undeniably, almost chemically, pleasing.

The subtext is also unmistakably gendered and a little predatory in its confidence. The woman is the object, her body the medium, her "goodness" measured in the lover’s sensory satisfaction. In fin-de-siecle French literary culture, where decadent writers flirted with both scientific rhetoric and aesthetic transgression, this sounds like a wink at the era’s obsession with physiology: you can dress lust up as an observation, call it nature, and pretend you’re merely reporting what the nose knows.

There’s irony in how absolute it is. "Always" dares you to test it, but it also reveals the fantasy: love as a permanent perfume, an emotion that sanitizes the messier facts of human bodies and relationships. It’s less about women than about the lover’s intoxication - the way infatuation edits reality, then insists the edit is the real thing.