Andre Gide Quotes

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

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

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

The itch is a mean, unconfessable, ridiculous malady; one can pity someone who is suffering ; someone who wants to scratch himself makes one laugh.

Do not think your truth can be found by anyone else.

So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity.

It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.

Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death

The anxiety we have for the figure we cut, for our personage, is constantly cropping out. We are showing off and are often more concerned with making a display than with living. Whoever feels observed observes himself.

If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.

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.

Drunkenness is never anything but a substitute for happiness.

Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.

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

Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.

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.

The great artist is one whom constraint exalts, for whom the obstacle is a springboard.

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.

God lies ahead. I convince myself and constantly repeat to myself that: He depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.

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

What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.

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.

The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions.

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.

When you have nothing to say, or to hide, there is no need to be prudent.

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

What thwarts us and demands of us the greatest effort is also what can teach us most.

The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.

The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers the most from its own limitations.

In order to judge properly, one must get away somewhat from what one is judging, after having loved it. This is true of countries, of persons, and of oneself.

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

To understand is nothing, but to be understood-that is the problem and the source of anguish. The soul throbs and would have the other know-but can not and feels isolated. Then come gestures, words, awkward explanations and material symbols for imponderable outbursts of feeling-and the soul despairs.

Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.

Understanding is the beginning of approving.

It is essential to persuade the soldier that those he is being urged to massacre are bandits who do not deserve to live; before killing other good, decent fellows like himself, his gun would fall from his hands.

There is a law in life: When one door closes to us another one opens.

The difficulty comes from this, that Christianity (Christian orthodoxy) is exclusive and that belief in its truth excludes belief in any other truth. It does not absorb; it repulses.

There's a law in life: whenever a door closes, a new one will open.

I find just as much profit in cultivating my hates as my loves.

The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it.

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

Chastity more rarely follows fear, or a resolution, or a vow, than it is the mere effect of lack of appetite and, sometimes even, of distaste.

It is often so: the harder it is to hear, the more a truth is worth saying.

Never have I been able to settle in life. Always seated askew, as if on the arm of a chair; ready to get up, to leave.

The very act of sacrifice magnifies the one who sacrifices himself to the point where his sacrifice is much more costly to humanity than would have been the loss of those for whom he is sacrificing himself. But in his abnegation lies the secret of his grandeur.

When I cease to be indignant I will have begun my old age.