The Immoralist

by André Gide

One may without too much conceit, I think, prefer the risk of failing to interest the moment by what is genuinely interesting—to beguiling momentarily a public fond of trash.

the air here fills you with a vague exaltation, induces a state which seems as remote from gaiety as it is from suffering; perhaps that is happiness.

I said I did not love her; at least I felt for her nothing of what is called love, yet I did love her if love means tenderness, a kind of pity, as well as a good deal of respect.

We began to speak. Her entertaining comments delighted me. I had somehow acquired ideas about the stupidity of women.

“What a miserable day!” I exclaimed. “Aren’t you bored to death?” “No, as you see: I’m reading.”

What matters is that merely being alive became quite amazing for me, and that the daylight acquired an unhoped-for radiance. Till now, I would think, I never realized that I was alive. Now I would make the thrilling discovery of life.

everything tires me, even reading; besides, what should I read? Being is occupation enough.

When I had given Moktir all the time he needed to rob me properly, I turned toward him again and spoke to him as if nothing had happened. Marceline was very fond of this child; yet it was not, I believe, the fear of giving her pain which made me, when I saw her next, instead of denouncing Moktir, devise some story or other to account for the disappearance of the scissors. From that day on, Moktir became my favorite.

At each ancient festival site, the ruin which remained in its place made me grieve over its death—and I had a horror of death.

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.

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.

This was more than a convalescence—this was an increase, a recrudescence of life, the afflux of a richer, hotter blood which would touch my thoughts one by one, penetrating everywhere, stirring, coloring the most remote, delicate and secret fibers of my being. For whether we are strong or weak, we grow accustomed to our condition; the self, according to its powers, takes shape; but what if these powers should increase, if they should afford a wider scope, what if … ?

Perhaps this need to lie cost me something, at first: but 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 the repetition, and soon a second nature.

What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told. —And now I have told you all that had prepared it.

I really gave very little thought to the matter: it was the risk of the venture which attracted me.

With other people, I felt dull, sad, inept, both boring and bored.

to make things easier, I acted as if I had the thoughts and tastes they attributed to me. You cannot be sincere and at the same time seem so.

And now, tonight, when I review the whole day’s occupations, I feel it’s been so futile, so empty that I’d like to turn back the clock and start over again, hour by hour—and I’m so miserable I could cry.”

a secret which seemed so much more mysterious: the secret of a Lazarus, for I was still a stranger among the others, like a man raised from the dead.

I described artistic culture as rising like a secretion to the surface of a people, at first a symptom of plethora, the superabundance of health, then immediately hardening, calcifying, opposing any true contact of the mind with nature, concealing beneath the persistent appearance of life the diminution of life, forming a rind in which the hindered spirit languishes, withers and dies.

“You have to let other people be right,” was his answer to their insults. “It consoles them for not being anything else.”

“Are you afraid of getting drunk?” “Oh, quite the contrary! I happen to regard sobriety as a more powerful intoxication—in which I keep my lucidity.”

“I have so little that nothing you see here belongs to me; not even, or especially not, the bed I sleep on. I have a horror of comfort; possessions invite comfort, and in their security a man falls asleep; I love life enough to try to live wide awake, and so, even among all my treasures, I cherish a sense of the precarious, by which I provoke or at least arouse my life. I can’t say I love danger, but I love a life of risk, I want life to demand of me, at every moment, all my courage, all my happiness, and all my health.”

How many dogmatists owe their strength to the accident that their hints were not understood!

How well I understood then that almost every ethical teaching of the great philosophers of antiquity was a teaching by example as much as—even more than—by words!

And the dust we were all breathing was made up of the dreadful erosion of things

People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don’t find themselves at all.

If there’s one thing I detest it’s a man of principles.”

Prove you’re not a man of principles—can I count on you to spend that last night with me?”

might at some point have been seduced by the sudden delights of the Moment, I reasoned—but the future dims the present even more than the present dimmed the past;

Of the thousand forms of life, each of us can know only one.

“I’ve cut my happiness to my measure too!” I exclaimed. “But I’ve grown. And now my happiness is too tight for me. Sometimes I’m almost strangled by it.”

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?”

“Regret, remorse, repentance—they’re all former joys, reversed.

Marceline coughed … Oh would she never stop coughing? I remembered the Sousse diligence: it seemed to me I had coughed better than that. She made too much of an effort

And I was filled with both the loathing and the love of such luxury. I bathed in it, steeped my sensuality in it, then wanted that sensuality to turn vagabond.

I began to feel I had been born to make undreamed-of discoveries; and I grew almost fanatical in my quest, for whose sake I realized the seeker must abjure, must disdain culture, propriety, rules.

“I can’t bear honest people. If I have nothing to fear from them, I have nothing to learn either.

I often recall those tears, and I realize now she must have known she was doomed: Marceline was mourning other springtimes. I suppose too that there are strong joys for the strong, and weak joys for the weak who would be injured by the stronger ones. Marceline was overwhelmed by the mildest enjoyment; anything more intense was intolerable to her. What she called happiness I called rest, and I neither could nor would rest.

We stared with amazement, under that leaden sky, at the whole disenchanted scene, and at the hotel’s dreary garden which had seemed so charming to us when our love strolled there.

Naples is a lively city where the past is not a tyrant.

I had to admit that to me each man’s worst instinct seemed the most sincere. Then, what was it I called sincerity?

A land liberated from works of art. I despise those who can acknowledge beauty only when it’s already transcribed, interpreted. One thing admirable about the Arabs: they live their art, they sing and scatter it from day to day; they don’t cling to it, they don’t embalm it in works.

Was it love, or anguish, or fever that made her tremble that way?…

I had sought and found what makes me what I am: a kind of persistence in the worst.

To such oases I now prefer the desert—a land of deadly glory and intolerable splendor.

We felt, alas, that by relating it, Michel had somehow legitimized his action. Not knowing where to object to it, in his gradual accounting, made us almost … accomplices.