André Gide Quotes

It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.

We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.

To tell the truth, my dear count, I must own that of all nauseating human emanations, literature is one of those which disgust me most. I can see nothing in it but compromise and flattery. And I go so far as to doubt whether it can be anything else.

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

Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.

One should want only one thing and want it constantly. Then one is sure of getting it. But I desire everything and consequently get nothing.

In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.

I say, "it seemed to me," for from the depths of my past childhood, there now awoke in me the glimmerings of a thousand lost sensations. The fact that I was once more aware of my senses enabled me to give them a half fearful recognition. Yes; my reawakened senses now remembered a whole ancient history of their own— recomposed for themselves a vanished past. They were alive! Alive! They had never ceased to live; they discovered that even during those early studious years they had been living their own latent, cunning life.

One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.

Yet I'm sure there's something more to be read in a man. People dare not -- they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry -- I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don't find themselves at all. I hate this moral agoraphobia -- it's the worst kind of cowardice. You can't create something without being alone. But who's trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that's just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life.

Man's responsibility increases as that of the gods decreases.

Through loyalty to the past our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.

I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance.

It is now and in this world that we must live.

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

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

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.

He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.

A work of art is an exaggeration.

Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.

Rather than recount his life as he has lived it, he must live his life as he will recount it.

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

Because it was natural, could he not see that it was marvelous? Poor creature!

The secret seemed to me much more mysterious than that; it was the secret, I thought, of one who had known death; for I moved a stranger among ordinary people, like a man who has risen from the grave, and at first I merely felt rather painfully out of my element; but soon I became aware of a very different feeling.Was it pride now? Perhaps; but at any rate there was no trace of vanity mixed with it. It was rather, for the first time, the consciousness of my own worth. What separated me - distinguished me - from other people was crucial; what no one said, what no one could say but myself, that was my task to say.

I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live - contented themselves with appearing to live, and were on the verge of considering life merely as a vexatious hindrance to writing.

Long only for what you have.

Oh would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas as the tree does its withered leaves!

The world will be saved by one or two people.

I do not want to recollect. I should be afraid of preventing the future and of 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.

Most people believe 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 doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates: he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don't dare to - they don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone - that is what they suffer from - and so they don't find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia - the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, 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.

Those who have eyes…do not know their happiness.

There is a germ of revolt lying in the spirit of inquiry and critical curiosity.

In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.

If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one's youth one's greatest indignation would be for what one has become.

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.

Will it be here that we shall find a place which will not elude us, or which if it remains does not exert on us a culpable attraction? Or must we, leaning over the deck and watching the shores glide by, move forever onward?

When I was younger, I used to make resolutions, which I imagined were virtuous. I was less anxious to be what I was, than to become what I wished to be. Now, I am not far from thinking that in irresolution lies the secret of not going old.

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

Poverty makes a slave out of men. In order to eat he will accept work that gives no pleasure.

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

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

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.

What would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.

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

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

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

Nothing can make a face more impenetrable than the mask of kindliness.

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

Our judgements about things vary according to the time left us to live -that we think is left us to live.

Nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.

Do you know why our poetry today and especially our philosophy are such dead issues? Because they've cut themselves off from life. Now, Greece idealized on life's own level: an artist's life was already a poetic achievement; a philosopher's life was an enactment of his philosophy; and when they were a part of life that way, instead of ignoring each other, philosophy could nourish poetry, poetry express philosophy, and together achieve an admirable persuasiveness. Today beauty no longer acts; and action no longer bothers about being beautiful; and wisdom operates on the sidelines.

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

The scholar seeks the artist finds.

A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.

No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart; then, finding sufficient sustenance in their rhythm and reveling in them at leisure, I closed the book and remained, trembling, more alive than I had thought possible, my mind numb with happiness.

Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.

This is my thesis: Do you know what is needful to turn an honest man into a rogue! A change of scene--a moment's forgetfulness suffice.

Nothing is good for everyone but only relatively to some people.

She already loved me too much to see me as I was.