The Possibility of Knowing Oneself

"Most [people] 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 accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man... Laws of imitation! Laws of fear... The fear of finding oneself alone - that is what they suffer from - and so they don't find themselves at all... One always has to be alone to invent anything - but they don't want to invent anything. 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. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life. (89-90)"

"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 ready-made; it has to be made to measure... I have tried to cut out my happiness to fit me. (94)"

"Do you know the reason why poetry and philosophy are nothing but dead-letter nowadays? It is because they have severed themselves from life. In Greece, ideas went hand in hand with life; so that the artist's life itself was already a poetic realization, a philosopher's life a putting into action of his philosophy; in this way, as both philosophy and poetry took part in life, instead of remaining unaquainted with each other, philosophy provided food for poetry, and poetry gave expression to philosophy... Nowadays beauty no longer acts; action no longer desires to be beautiful; and wisdom works in a sphere apart. (95)"

"I should be afraid of preventing the future and 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. (95)"

Quotes from André Gide's The Immoralist