Education Quote by Remy de Gourmont

A bleak little paradox dressed up as a civilized observation: the modern mind, de Gourmont suggests, is becoming a machine for knowledge at the expense of experience. “We live less and less” isn’t a complaint about lifespan; it’s about texture. Life, in his framing, is made of risk, appetite, distraction, bodily immediacy, the messy business of being moved by things. “We learn more and more” is the compensatory triumph: an age proud of its archives, its systems, its explanations. The sting is that the second line makes the trade-off sound not accidental but directional, almost evolutionary. Sensibility doesn’t get refined; it “surrenders,” as if it’s losing a war it didn’t choose.

The intent is diagnostic and faintly accusatory: a warning aimed at a culture that confuses information with living, cognition with contact. De Gourmont, writing in fin-de-siecle France amid accelerating science, journalism, and bureaucratic modernity, is close to the Symbolist distrust of positivism and the Decadent fear that analysis sterilizes feeling. The subtext is a critique of intellectual prestige itself. Intelligence here isn’t heroic; it’s imperial. It colonizes the self, training people to narrate their lives instead of inhabiting them.

What makes the line work is its clean reversal of the usual moral arc. We’re trained to treat “learning more” as progress. De Gourmont flips it into a symptom: the smarter the culture gets, the more it may anesthetize its capacity to be struck, changed, or even simply present. The elegance is the cruelty; he offers no fix, just the chilling implication that lucidity might be one more way of opting out.