Top 100 Andre Gide Quotes
#1. At times is it seems that I am living my life backward, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles. Wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.
Andre Gide
#2. Whoever starts out toward the unknown must consent to venture alone.
Andre Gide
#3. The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.
Andre Gide
#4. Don't think that your truth could be found by someone else.
Andre Gide
#5. Man's first and greatest victory must be won against the gods.
Andre Gide
#6. 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.
Andre Gide
#7. Clear and precise ideas are the most dangerous, for one does not dare to change them.
Andre Gide
#8. He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.
Andre Gide
#9. Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes
Andre Gide
#10. 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?
Andre Gide
#11. Oh," I thought, "without a doubt, everything in my life is falling to pieces. Nothing that my hand grasps can my hand hold.
Andre Gide
#12. It is now, and in this world, that we must live.
Andre Gide
#13. It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
Andre Gide
#14. 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.
Andre Gide
#15. 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.
Andre Gide
#16. 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.
Andre Gide
#17. What would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.
Andre Gide
#18. Wild animals passed on their way under the leaves; each track was an arterial road; and when I stooped and looked at the earth close to, I saw, from leaf to leaf and flower to flower, a moving host of insects.
Andre Gide
#19. Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.
Andre Gide
#20. God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.
Andre Gide
#22. What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.
Andre Gide
#23. True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joys of others.
Andre Gide
#24. ...Gradation; gradation; and then a sudden leap...
Andre Gide
#26. I had forgotten I was alone; I sat there, waiting for nothing, oblivious to the time.
Andre Gide
#27. When I was younger, I used to make resolutions which 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 growing old.
Andre Gide
#28. The true return to nature is the definitive return to the elements-death.
Andre Gide
#29. Too chaste an adolescence makes for a dissolute old age. It is doubtless easier to give up something one has known than something one imagines.
Andre Gide
#30. It is better to fail at your own life than to succeed at someone else's.
Andre Gide
#31. When you have nothing to say, or to hide, there is no need to be prudent.
Andre Gide
#32. What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.
Andre Gide
#33. 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.
Andre Gide
#34. It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.
Andre Gide
#36. Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.
Andre Gide
#37. But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.
Andre Gide
#38. Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, but lacks imagination and deep self-expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship.
Andre Gide
#39. The wise man is astonished by anything.
Andre Gide
#40. The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.
Andre Gide
#41. Only fools don't contradict themselves
Andre Gide
#42. Woe to these people who have no appetite for the very dish that their age serves up.
Andre Gide
#43. Those who complimented me were those who understood me the least.
Andre Gide
#44. 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.
Andre Gide
#45. There is a law in life: When one door closes to us another one opens.
Andre Gide
#46. We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.
Andre Gide
#47. In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring ...
Andre Gide
#48. Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon.
Andre Gide
#49. Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Andre Gide
#50. 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.
Andre Gide
#51. He who makes great demands upon himself is naturally inclined to make great demands on others.
Andre Gide
#52. I wished for nothing beyond her smile, and to walk with her thus, hand in hand, along a sun warmed, flower bordered path.
Andre Gide
#53. The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.
Andre Gide
#54. The public always prefers to be reassured. There are those whose job this is. There are only too many.
Andre Gide
#55. Actions whose motives he cannot understand that is, actions not prompted by the hope of profit.
Andre Gide
#56. Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death
Andre Gide
#57. The individual never asserts himself more than when he forgets himself.
Andre Gide
#58. 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.
Andre Gide
#59. To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.
Andre Gide
#60. After much searching I have found the thing that sets me apart: a sort of stubborn attachment to evil.
Andre Gide
#62. The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love.
Andre Gide
#63. Drunkenness is never anything but a substitute for happiness.
Andre Gide
#64. People don't want to be like themselves. They all choose a model to imitate, or if they don't choose a model themselves, they accept one ready-made.
Andre Gide
#65. It is good to follow one's own bent, so long as it leads upward.
Andre Gide
#66. With each book you write you should lose the admirers you gained with the previous one.
Andre Gide
#67. To love the truth is to refuse to let oneself be saddened by it.
Andre Gide
#68. There's a law in life: whenever a door closes, a new one will open.
Andre Gide
#69. The abominable effort to take one's sins with one to paradise.
Andre Gide
#70. The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.
Andre Gide
#71. Better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
Andre Gide
#72. If your target as a Muslim artist, writer or speaker is to target only Muslims you need to rethink your plan.
Andre Gide
#73. They establish distinctions and reserves which I cannot apply to myself, for I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it.
Andre Gide
#74. The most beaten paths are certainly the surest, but do not hope to start much game on them.
Andre Gide
#75. There are admirable potentialities in every human being.
Andre Gide
#76. 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.
Andre Gide
#77. 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.
Andre Gide
#78. The itch is a mean, unconfessable, ridiculous malady; one can pity someone who is suffering ; someone who wants to scratch himself makes one laugh.
Andre Gide
#79. It is with fine sentiments that bad literature is made. Descend to the bottom of the well if you wish to see the stars.
Andre Gide
#80. Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.
Andre Gide
#81. I am not sure whether I altogether understand you. You make me curious. I don't much care about talking, but I should like to talk to you.
Andre Gide
#82. We no longer admit any other truth than that which is expedient; for there is no worse error than the truth that may weaken the arm that is fighting.
Andre Gide
#83. One is always wrong to open a conversation with the devil, for, however he goes about it, he always insists upon having the last word.
Andre Gide
#84. Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
Andre Gide
#85. In a world in which everyone cheats, it's the honest man who passes for a charlatan.
Andre Gide
#86. 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
Andre Gide
#87. The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death's reach.
Andre Gide
#88. If only we could lean over the soul we love and see as in a mirror the image we cast!
Andre Gide
#89. Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessors of happiness
Andre Gide
#90. Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
Andre Gide
#91. The individual person is more interesting than people in general; he and not they is the one whom God created in His image.
Andre Gide
#92. And who shall say how many passions and how many hostile thoughts may live together in the mind of man?
Andre Gide
#93. 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.
Andre Gide
#94. We call "happiness" a certain set of circumstances that makes joy possible. But we call joy that state of mind and emotions that needs nothing to feel happy.
Andre Gide
#95. Too chaste a youth leads to a dissolute old age.
Andre Gide
#96. Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.
Andre Gide
#97. Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.
Andre Gide
#98. I prefer granting with a good grace what I know I shan't be able to prevent.
Andre Gide
#99. I can't expect others to share my virtues. It's good enough for me if they share my vices.
Andre Gide
#100. The things one feels are different about oneself are the things that are rare, that give each person their value - and these are the things they try to repress. The imitate and make out they love life!
Andre Gide
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