Daily Inspiration Quote by Remy de Gourmont

Truth, for Remy de Gourmont, isn’t something you stumble over like a rock in the road; it’s something you assemble. His line draws a clean, slightly mischievous boundary between the brute givenness of a fact and the human invention required to make it mean anything. Facts, alone, are inert: a temperature reading, a casualty number, a date on a document. “Abstraction” is the mental act that turns those fragments into concepts like progress, decline, justice, decadence. The point is not that abstraction corrupts truth, but that truth is impossible without it.

That idea lands with particular force in fin-de-siecle France, where de Gourmont moved in Symbolist circles suspicious of bourgeois “common sense” and allergic to positivism’s fantasy that reality can be fully captured by measurement. He is pushing back against the era’s growing faith in data-as-destiny. If you want truth, he implies, you must admit interpretation is not an unfortunate aftertaste; it’s an ingredient.

The subtext has teeth: whoever controls abstraction controls truth. The same fact can be recruited into rival stories depending on which abstraction you hang it on - “crime” versus “resistance,” “disorder” versus “liberation.” De Gourmont’s sentence reads like an early warning about propaganda and ideological framing, but it also defends the novelist’s craft. Fiction, at its best, doesn’t reject facts; it metabolizes them into patterns and meanings that bare reportage can’t deliver. Truth, he suggests, is the marriage of evidence and imagination, and the vows are political.