André Gide: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Every instant of our lives is essentially irreplaceable: you must know this in order to concentrate on life.”

“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.”

“In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring…”

“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.”