Andre Gide Quotes

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

A work of art is an exaggeration.

Whither should we aim if not towards God?

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

Do not scorn little victories.

Through fear of resembling one another, through horror of having to submit, through uncertainty as well, through skepticism and complexity, there is a multitude of individual little beliefs for the triumph of strange little individuals.

The individual person is more interesting than people in general; he and not they is the one whom God created in His image.

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

The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.

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

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

In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.

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

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

Mozart's joy is made of serenity, and a phrase of his music is like a calm thought; his simplicity is merely purity. It is a crystalline thing in which all the emotions play a role, but as if already celestially transposed. Moderation consists in feeling emotions as the angels do.

The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

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

Faith can move mountains; true: mountains of stupidity.

Each thought becomes an anxiety in my brain. I am becoming the ugliest of all things: a busy man.

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.

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

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?

Laws and rules of conduct are for the state of childhood; education is an emancipation.

The only real education comes from what goes counter to you.

Don't think that your truth could be found by someone else.

Man! The most complex of creatures, and for this reason the most dependant of creatures. On everything that has formed you, you may depend. Do not balk at this apparent slavery....a debtor to many, you pay for your advantages by the same number of dependencies. Understand that independence is a form of poverty; that many things claim you, that many also claim kinship with you.

The belief that becomes truth for me... is that which allows me the best use of my strength, the best means of putting my virtues into action.

"Let the dead bury the dead." There is not a single word of Christ to which the Christian religion has paid less attention.

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

Enduring fame is promised only to those writers who can offer to successive generations a substance constantly renewed; for every generation arrives upon the scene with its own particular hunger.

I advise the young to tell themselves constantly that most often it is up to them alone.

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

Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! And without too many regrets, if possible! Those from which the sap has withdrawn. But, good Lord, what beautiful colors!

The true return to nature is the definitive return to the elements-death.

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

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

No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.

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

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

From the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair.

The young people who come to me in the hope of hearing me utter a few memorable maxims are quite disappointed. Aphorisms are not my forte, I say nothing but banalities.... I listen to them and they go away delighted.

Woe to these people who have no appetite for the very dish that their age serves up.

Though a revolution may call itself "national," it always marks the victory of a single party.

There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.

Nothing blocks happiness like happiness remembered.

The color of truth is gray.

Are you then unable to recognize unless it has the same sound as yours?

Without mysticism man can achieve nothing great.