# The Immoralist - Author: [André Gide](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide.md) - Quotes: 26 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist ## Quotes > Today beauty no longer acts, and action no longer bothers about being beautiful. p. 111 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/today-beauty-no-longer.md) > What distinguished me from the rest was what mattered; what no one but I … could say—that was what I had to say. p. 92 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/what-distinguished-me-from.md) > 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. p. 51 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/what-interest-could.md) > 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. p. 105 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/if-theres-one.md) > 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. p. 71 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/the-apple-trees.md) > 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. p. 90 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/as-for-the.md) > 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. p. 51 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/my-sole-effort.md) > Nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness. p. 63 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/nothing-thwarts-happiness.md) > 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. p. 61 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/everything-filled-me-with.md) > 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.” p. 91 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/i-made-no-attempt.md) > Their clumsy thoughts were of no interest to me. p. 119 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/their-clumsy-thoughts.md) > 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. p. 104 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/if-only-the.md) > Each joy is like manna in the desert, which spoils from one day to the next. p. 112 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/each-joy-is-like.md) > 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. p. 104 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/what-seems-different.md) > You have to let other people be right. It consoles them for not being anything else. p. 94 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/you-have-to-let.md) > 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. p. 51 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/to-the-man.md) > 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? p. 159 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/the-great-artists.md) > … actions whose motives he cannot understand—that is, actions not prompted by the hope of profit. p. 122 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/actions-whose-motives.md) > 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. p. 146 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/what-more-can.md) > There comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass p. 63 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/there-comes-a-point.md) > You cannot be sincere and at the same time seem so. p. 90 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/you-cannot-be-sincere.md) > The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free, that is the task. p. 7 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/the-capacity-to-get.md) > People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don’t find themselves at all. p. 104 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/people-are-afraid.md) > 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? p. 111 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/i-create-each.md) > 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. p. 60 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/i-soon-realized.md) > 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 p. 104 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/i-cannot-apply.md)