"Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him"
About this Quote
A small bomb of permission disguised as a polite aphorism: de Gourmont gives the individual not just freedom of feeling, but authorship over the rules that legitimize those feelings. The line isn’t offering therapy; it’s smuggling in a worldview. Emotions aren’t treated as spontaneous truths that happen to us, but as tools we authorize ourselves to use. Morality, in turn, isn’t a civic ledger handed down by church or state. It’s a custom fit, chosen to make one’s inner life livable.
That “must” is doing sly work. It sounds like liberation, but it’s also an indictment of inherited ethics: if you don’t grant yourself a workable moral code, you’ll end up borrowing one that doesn’t match your actual desires, then living in bad faith. De Gourmont was writing from fin-de-siecle France, where Decadence and Symbolism prized subjectivity and aesthetic self-fashioning while bourgeois morality tightened its grip in public life. Against that backdrop, the quote reads like an anti-bourgeois survival tactic: stop asking society for emotional permits.
The subtext is sharper than it first appears. “Grant himself” implies power and self-deception at once: we can dignify our needs, but we can also launder them. A morality that “suits” you might be integrity, or it might be a tailored alibi. De Gourmont’s provocation lands because it forces a modern discomfort into the open: we already curate our feelings and rationalize our ethics. He just refuses to pretend otherwise.
That “must” is doing sly work. It sounds like liberation, but it’s also an indictment of inherited ethics: if you don’t grant yourself a workable moral code, you’ll end up borrowing one that doesn’t match your actual desires, then living in bad faith. De Gourmont was writing from fin-de-siecle France, where Decadence and Symbolism prized subjectivity and aesthetic self-fashioning while bourgeois morality tightened its grip in public life. Against that backdrop, the quote reads like an anti-bourgeois survival tactic: stop asking society for emotional permits.
The subtext is sharper than it first appears. “Grant himself” implies power and self-deception at once: we can dignify our needs, but we can also launder them. A morality that “suits” you might be integrity, or it might be a tailored alibi. De Gourmont’s provocation lands because it forces a modern discomfort into the open: we already curate our feelings and rationalize our ethics. He just refuses to pretend otherwise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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