The Immoralist Quotes

“Their clumsy thoughts were of no interest to me.”

“You cannot be sincere and at the same time seem so.”

“Nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.”

“Each joy is like manna in the desert, which spoils from one day to the next.”

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

“The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free, that is the task.”

“Today beauty no longer acts, and action no longer bothers about being beautiful.”

“You have to let other people be right. It consoles them for not being anything else.”

“There comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass”

“Wikipedia: The Immoralist”

“… actions whose motives he cannot understand—that is, actions not prompted by the hope of profit.”

“What distinguished me from the rest was what mattered; what no one but I … could say—that was what I had to say.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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?”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”