Wit & Attitude Quote by Remy de Gourmont

“Very simple ideas” sounds like a democratic promise until Gourmont snaps it shut: simplicity is not the default setting of thought but its hard-won end state. The line is designed as a paradox that flatters and scolds at once. It flatters the “complex minds” who can distill a chaos of impressions into something clean. It scolds the rest of us for mistaking simplification for shallow certainty, for assuming that whatever comes out short and crisp must have arrived there easily.

Gourmont wrote as a fin-de-siecle French man of letters, skeptical of mass opinion and allergic to intellectual conformity. In that cultural climate, “simple ideas” were becoming commodities: slogans, moral platitudes, newspaper certainties. His intent is to pry apart two kinds of simple: the dumbed-down and the distilled. The former is a shortcut that bypasses contradiction; the latter is compression after confrontation. A complex mind earns simplicity by tolerating ambiguity long enough to metabolize it.

The subtext is also a quiet jab at the era’s cult of the “plain truth.” What passes for plain often hides unexamined assumptions. Real clarity, Gourmont implies, requires a kind of internal complexity: wide reading, self-doubt, an ability to hold competing models of the world without panicking. Only then can you produce an idea so straightforward it feels obvious in retrospect. The sentence works because it reverses our usual hierarchy. Complexity isn’t the showy peak of intelligence; it’s the scaffolding that makes genuine simplicity possible.