Love & Passion Quote by Remy de Gourmont

A neat little cruelty hides inside Remy de Gourmont's symmetry: he turns romance into an accounting trick, then uses the imbalance to indict male amnesia. "First kiss" versus "last" isn't just a timeline; it's a theory of emotional memory. Women, he suggests, preserve beginnings as talismans, while men misplace endings because endings demand reckoning. The line works because it flatters and wounds at the same time: it canonizes women's sentiment as deeper, then frames men's forgetfulness as a kind of moral evasiveness.

The subtext is fin-de-siecle gender politics, when "woman" was often cast as the guardian of feeling and "man" as the agent of appetite, liberty, and exit. De Gourmont, a Symbolist-leaning critic and novelist, is trading in that period's fascination with desire as illusion and love as performance. The epigram's tightness makes it feel like an observation, not an argument, which is how it smuggles in its stereotype: women's memory equals fidelity; men's forgetfulness equals freedom. Even the grammar bakes in hierarchy. Women "still remember" (persistence, burden). Men "have forgotten" (done, unbothered).

Context matters: this is salon cynicism dressed as insight, a line engineered to land in conversation, to spark a knowing laugh that also stings. Its longevity comes from that double-action punch. It doesn't describe love; it describes the politics of who gets to narrate it after it's over.