Excerpts from The Immoralist by Andre' Gide

Excerpts from The Immoralist by Andre' Gide

"To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom."

Speaking of his marriage, "I pledged my life before I knew what the possibilities of life were."

Of his mother's teaching, "I did not then suspect how great a hold the early moral lessons of our childhood take on one, nor what marks they leave upon the mind."

In first realizing a fear of death, "What was the reason for my fear, my horror now? Alas! It was because I had begun to love life."

"He it was whom I thenceforward set out to discover - that authentic creature, 'the old Adam,' whom the Gospel had repudiated, whom everything about me - books, masters, parents, and I myself - had begun by attempting to suppress. And he was already coming into view, still in the rough and difficult of discovery, thanks to all that overlay him, but so much more worthy to be discovered, so much the more valorous. Thenceforward I despised the secondary creature, the creature who was due to teaching, whom education had painted on the surface. These overlays had to be shaken off."

"And yet I should not have been able to say what I meant by 'living,' nor whether the very simple secret of my trouble was not that I had acquired a taste for a more spacious, breezier life, one that was less hemmed in, less regardful of others; . . . It was rather, for the first time, the consciousness of my own worth. What separated me - distinguished me - from other people was crucial; what no one said, what no one could say but myself, that it was my task to say."

His friend Me'nalque is speaking, "But most of them believe that it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates; he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him . . .. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value - and that is the very thing people try to suppress."

Me'nalque continues, "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."

And, " . . . I do not want to recollect; I should be afraid of preventing the future and of allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour's freshness. It is never enough for me to have been happy. I do not believe in dead things and cannot distinguish between being no more and never having been."

Michel speaking, "What Marceline gave me, what she stood for in my eyes, was like rest to a man who is not tired."

"The smiling harmony once mine is mine no longer . . .. No longer do I know what dark mysterious God I serve. O great new God! Grant me the knowledge of other newer races, unimagined types of beauty."

At the end, "This objectless liberty is a burden to me . . .. It is not, believe me, that I am tired of my crime - if you choose to call it that - but I must prove to myself that I have not overstepped my rights."