The Immoralist

by André Gide

I believe that happiness wears out in the effort made to recapture it; that nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.

Of the thousand forms of life, each of us can know but one. It is madness to envy other people's happiness; one would not know what to do with it. Happiness won't come to one ready-made; it has to be made to measure.

who shall say how many passions and how many hostile thoughts may live together in the mind of man? . . .