Daily Inspiration Quote by Remy de Gourmont

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.