André Gide Quotes

“You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore”

“Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.”

“Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.”

“Please do not understand me too quickly.”

“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.”

“You have to let other people be right' was his answer to their insults. 'It consoles them for not being anything else.”

“When people felt they had a right to seek out Christ before the torment, and in the fullness of his joy—it was too late; the cross had overcome Christ himself; it was Christ crucified that people continued to see and teach. And thus it is that religion came to plunge the world into gloom.”

“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?”

“When intelligent people pride themselves on not understanding, it is quite natural they should succeed better than fools.”

“Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.”

“The most decisive actions of our life — I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future — are, more often than not, unconsidered.”

“Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for so long as that?… And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?”

“At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles—wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.”

“The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it.”

“I have my own virtue, which I am constantly cultivating and refining by teaching myself not to tolerate in me or my surroundings anything but the exquisite.”

“The color of truth is grey.”

“The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.”

“I do not love men: I love what devours them.”

“Envying another man's happiness is madness; you wouldn't know what to do with it if you had it.”

“He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.”

“Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.”

“Only fools don't contradict themselves”

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

“Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.”

“One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.”

“There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.”

“God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.”

“Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. It's their way of falling.”

“Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.”

“Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.”

“We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us”

“Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself — and thus make yourself indispensable.”

“What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.”

“Wisdom comes not from reason but from love.”

“There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.”

“To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.”

“We should enjoy this summer, flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one we’ll see.”

“A man thinks he owns things, and it is he who is owned”

“I wished for nothing beyond her smile, and to walk with her thus, hand in hand, along a sun warmed, flower bordered path.”

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

“Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.”

“I can't expect others to share my virtues. It's good enough for me if they share my vices.”

“Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.”

“Seize from every moment it's unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys.”

“True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one’s own the suffering and joys of others.”

“The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.”

“The only really Christian art is that which, like St. Francis, does not fear being wedded to poverty. This rises far above art-as-ornament.”

“True intelligence very readily conceives of an intelligence superior to its own; and this is why truly intelligent men are modest.”

“A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.”

“The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.”

“There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection.”

“Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always finds an inhabitant. The artist’s business is to build the dwelling; as for the inhabitant, it is up to the reader to provide him.”

“The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes.”

“Often the best in us springs from the worst in us.”

“Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.”

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

“We call “happiness” a certain set of circumstances that makes joy possible. But we call joy that state of mind and emotions that needs nothing to feel happy.”

“It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.”

“O my dearest and most lovable thought, why should I try further to legitimize your birth?”

“It seems to me that had I not known Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or Freud or X or Z, I should have thought just as I did, and that I found in them rather an authorization than an awakening. Above all, they taught me to cease doubting, to cease fearing my thoughts, and to let those thoughts lead me to those lands that were not uninhabitable because after all I found them already there.”

“Sin is whatever obscures the soul.”

“Let every emotion be capable of becoming an intoxication to you. If what you eat fails to make you drunk, it is because you are not hungry enough.”

“Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.”

“The abominable effort to take one’s sins with one to paradise.”

“Generally among intelligent people are found nothing but paralytics and among men of action nothing but fools.”