Ah; but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! —Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illumined no longer by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope.

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul.

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay, and whoever does not settle it here below, defrays it after death; happiness is only lent, and must be repaid; its very phantoms are like duties paid in advance on a future succession of sorrows.

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

Far from seeking to justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: 'If a God has made this world, I should not wish to be that God. The world's wretchedness would rend my heart.

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated DES Estates. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would, might feel obliged to dishonor them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

His scorn of humanity grew by what it fed on; he realized in fact that the world is mostly made up of solemn humbugs and silly idiots. There was no room for doubt; he could entertain no hope of discovering in another the same aspirations and the same antipathies, no hope of joining forces with a mind that, like his own, should find its satisfaction in a life of studious idleness; no hope of uniting a keen and doctrinaire spirit such as his, with that of a writer and a man of learning.

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

I marvel at the placidity of the Utopian who imagines that man is perfectible. There is no denying that the human creature is born selfish, abusive, vile. Just look around you and see. Society cynical and ferocious, the humble heckled and pillaged by the rich traffickers in necessities. Everywhere the triumph of the mediocre and unscrupulous, everywhere the apotheosis of crooked politics and finance. And you think you can make any progress against a stream like that? No, man has never changed. His soul was corrupt in the days of Genesis and is not less rotten at present. Only the form of his sins varies. Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves of human mediocrity rise to the sky, and they will engulf the refuge whose dams I open. Ah! Courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity the Christian who doubts, the skeptic who would believe, the convict of life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined byte consoling beacons of ancient faith.

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.

— Joris-Karl Huysmans