# Quote — André Gide, The Immoralist

> 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.

- Author: [André Gide](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide.md)
- Book: [The Immoralist](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist.md)
- Page: 51
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Immoralist#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/andre-gide/the-immoralist/to-the-man

## More from this book

> 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)