Andre Gide Quotes

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

It is only through restraint that man can manage not to suppress himself.

I believe that in every circumstance I have been able to see rather clearly the most advantageous course I could follow, which is very rarely the one I did follow.

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

But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.

Most often it happens that one attributes to others only the feelings of which one is capable oneself.

Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys.

Of some forty families I have been able to observe, I know hardly four in which the parents do not act in such a way that nothing would be more desirable for the child than to escape their influence.

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.

With each book you write you should lose the admirers you gained with the previous one.

Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessors of happiness

It is the special quality of love not to be able to remain stationary, to be obliged to increase under pain of diminishing.

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

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

It is one of life's laws that as soon as one door closes another opens. But the tragedy is we look at the closed door and disregard the open one.

What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - and thus make yourself indispensable.

It is not becoming to lay to virtue the weariness of old age.

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

Humanity cherishes its swaddling clothes; but it shall not grow up unless it can free itself from them. Turning down his mother's breast does not make the weaned child ungrateful. ... Rise up naked, valiant; make the sheaths crack; push aside the stakes; to grow straight you need no more than the thrust of your sap and the call of the sun.

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

I owe much to my friends; but, all things considered, it strikes me that I owe even more to my enemies. The real person springs life under a sting even better than under a caress.

Clear and precise ideas are the most dangerous, for one does not dare to change them.

It would be wisest not to worry too much about the sterile periods. They ventilate the subject and instill into it the reality of daily life.

How do you know that the fruit is ripe? Simply because it leaves the branch.

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

I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts.

Whoever starts out toward the unknown must consent to venture alone.

Believe in your strength and your vision. Learn to repeat to yourself, 'It all depends on me'.

The most subtle art, the strongest and deepest art - supreme art - is the one that does not at first allow itself to be recognized.

An unprejudiced mind is probably the rarest thing in the world; to nonprejudice I attach the greatest value.

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

Understand that the only possession of any value is life.

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

There are admirable potentialities in every human being.

Solitude is bearable only with God.

Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes

An experience teaches only the good observer; but far from seeking a lesson in it, everyone looks for an argument in experience, and everyone interprets the conclusion in his own way.

The individual never asserts himself more than when he forgets himself.

Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents only one of a thousand attitudes. You must find your own. If someone else could have done something as well as you, don’t do it. If someone else could have said something as well as you, don’t say it—or written something as well as you, don’t write it. Grow fond only of that which you can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or patiently, ah! that most irreplaceable of beings.

A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.

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

Long only for what you have.

Sin is whatever obscures the soul.

The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.

To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.

The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love.

An artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.