The Immoralist

The Immoralist (French: L'Immoraliste) is a novel by André Gide, published in France in 1902.

Quotes
as translated by R. Howard


 * The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free, that is the task.
 * Michael, p. 7


 * To the man whom death’s wing has touched, what once seemed important is so no longer; and other things become so which once did not seem important or which he did not even know existed. The layers of acquired knowledge peel away from the mind like a cosmetic and reveal, in patches, the naked flesh beneath, the authentic being hidden there. Henceforth this was what I sought to discover: the authentic being, “the old Adam” whom the Gospels no longer accepted; the man whom everything around me—books, teachers, family and I myself—had tried from the first to suppress. And I had already glimpsed him, faint, obscured by their encrustations, but all the more valuable, all the more urgent. I scorned henceforth that secondary, learned being whom education had pasted over him. And I would compare myself to a palimpsest; I shared the thrill of the scholar who beneath more recent script discovers, on the same paper, an infinitely more precious ancient text.
 * Michael, p. 51


 * My sole effort … was therefore systematically to revile or suppress whatever I believed due merely to past education and to my early moral indoctrination. In deliberate scorn of my own erudition, in disdain for my scholarly pastimes.
 * Michael, p. 51


 * What interest could I take in myself, except as a perfectible being? This unknown perfection, vaguely as I imagined it, exalted my will as never before in my longing to achieve it; I dedicated this will utterly to fortifying my body.
 * Michael, p. 51


 * I soon realized that what are supposedly the worst things (lying, to mention only one) are hard to do only when you have never done them; but that each of them becomes, and so quickly! easy, pleasant, sweet in repetition, and soon a second nature.
 * Michael, p. 60


 * Everything filled me with the joy of being alive until my whole being seemed no more than a hovering rapture: memories or regrets, hope or desire, future and past fell silent; I knew nothing of life but what the moment brought to it, took from it.
 * Michael, p. 61


 * There comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass
 * Michael, p. 63


 * Nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.
 * Michael, p. 63


 * The apple trees planted in rows on the favorable hillsides heralded a splendid crop that summer; I dreamed of the rich burden of fruit beneath which their branches would soon be bending. From this orderly abundance, from this happy subservience, from this smiling cultivation, a harmony was being wrought, no longer fortuitous but imposed, a rhythm, a beauty at once human and natural, in which one could no longer tell what was most admirable, so intimately united into a perfect understanding were the fecund exposition of free nature and man’s skillful effort to order it. What would that effort be, I thought, without the powerful savagery it masters? What would be the savage energy of the overflowing sap without the intelligent effort which channels and discharges it into profusion?—And I let myself dream of such lands where every force was so well controlled, every expenditure so compensated, every exchange so strict, that the slightest waste became evident; then, applying my dream to life, I sketched an ethic which would become a science of self-exploitation perfected by a disciplined intelligence.
 * Michael, p. 71-72


 * You cannot be sincere and at the same time seem so.
 * Michael, p. 90


 * As for the philosophers, whose role might have been to instruct me, I had long known what to expect of them; mathematicians or neo-Kantians, they kept as far as possible from troublesome reality, and were no more concerned with life than the algebrist with the existence of the quantities he is measuring.
 * Michael, p. 90


 * I made no attempt to conceal the tedium of these encounters. “They’re all alike,” I told her, “and each repeats the next. Whenever I talk to one, it seems to me I’m talking to several.”
 * “But my dear,” Marceline answered, “you can’t ask each one to be different from all the rest.”
 * “The more they’re like each other, the less they’re like me.” And I continued more wearily: … “They seem to be alive and not to know it.”
 * Michael, p. 91


 * What distinguished me from the rest was what mattered; what no one but I … could say—that was what I had to say.
 * Michael, p. 92


 * You have to let other people be right. It consoles them for not being anything else.
 * Ménalque, p. 94


 * I cannot apply to myself the distinctions and the reservations they insist on making—I exist only as a whole man. I lay claim to nothing but my own nature, and the pleasure I take in an action is my clue to its propriety
 * Ménalque, p. 104


 * If only the people around us could be convinced. But most of them believe they get nothing good out of themselves except by constraint; they’re only pleased with themselves when they’re under duress. If there’s one thing each of them claims not to resemble it’s … himself. Instead he sets up a model, then imitates it; he doesn’t even choose the model—he accepts it ready-made.
 * Ménalque, p. 104, ellipsis in original


 * People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don’t find themselves at all.
 * Ménalque, p. 104


 * What seems different in yourself: that’s the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that’s just what we try to suppress.
 * Ménalque, p. 104


 * If there’s one thing I detest it’s a man of principles. … You can’t expect any kind of sincerity from him, for he only does what his principles have ordered him to do, or else he considers what he does a transgression.
 * Michael and Ménalque, p. 105


 * Today beauty no longer acts, and action no longer bothers about being beautiful.
 * Ménalque, p. 111


 * I create each hour’s newness by forgetting yesterday completely. Having been happy is never enough for me. I don’t believe in dead things. What’s the difference between no longer being and never having been?
 * Ménalque, p. 111


 * Each joy is like manna in the desert, which spoils from one day to the next.
 * Ménalque, p. 112


 * Their clumsy thoughts were of no interest to me.
 * Michael, p. 119


 * … actions whose motives he cannot understand—that is, actions not prompted by the hope of profit.
 * Michael, p. 122


 * What more can man do, what else can man be? That was what I had to know. Was what man had said up till then all he could say? Wasn’t there something he didn’t know about himself? Could he merely repeat himself? … And day by day there grew within me the confused sense of untapped wealth lying hidden, smothered by culture, propriety, rules.
 * Michael, p. 146 (ellipsis in original)


 * The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they’re seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?
 * Michael, p. 159