Top 100 Andre Gide Quotes
#1. There is a long dishonourable tradition of western intellectuals who have been duped by Moscow. The list includes Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, H. G. Wells, and Andre Gide.
Luke Harding
#2. We are readying ourselves to enter a long tunnel full of blood and darkness (Andre Gide, 28 July 1914)
Max Hastings
#3. She already loved me too much to see me as I was.
Andre Gide
#4. 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
#5. It is not becoming to lay to virtue the weariness of old age.
Andre Gide
#6. I find just as much profit in cultivating my hates as my loves.
Andre Gide
#7. Whoever starts out toward the unknown must consent to venture alone.
Andre Gide
#8. We who would seek new land must be willing to sacrifice the sight of shore for a long, long time.
Andre Gide
#9. 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 Those from which the sap has withdrawn.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!
Andre Gide
#10. Other people's appetites easily appear excessive when one doesn't share them.
Andre Gide
#11. The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.
Andre Gide
#12. Without mysticism man can achieve nothing great.
Andre Gide
#13. The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea.
Andre Gide
#14. The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.
Andre Gide
#15. An opinion, though it is original, does not necessarily differ from the accepted opinion; the important thing is that it does not try to conform to it.
Andre Gide
#16. Don't think that your truth could be found by someone else.
Andre Gide
#17. Man's first and greatest victory must be won against the gods.
Andre Gide
#18. There is no work of art that is without short cuts.
Andre Gide
#19. The novelist does not long to see the
lion eat grass. He realizes that one and
the same God created the wolf and the
lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his
work was good."
Andre Gide
#20. The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it.
Andre Gide
#21. 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.
Andre Gide
#22. 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
#23. Clear and precise ideas are the most dangerous, for one does not dare to change them.
Andre Gide
#24. He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.
Andre Gide
#25. So as long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity.
Andre Gide
#26. Man: The most complex of beings, and thus the most dependent of beings. On all that made you up, you depend.
Andre Gide
#27. Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes
Andre Gide
#28. A man thinks he owns things, and it is he who is owned
Andre Gide
#29. 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
#30. Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.
Andre Gide
#31. 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
#32. The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.
Andre Gide
#33. Nothing is good for everyone, but only relatively to some people.
Andre Gide
#34. It is now, and in this world, that we must live.
Andre Gide
#35. Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.
Andre Gide
#36. It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
Andre Gide
#37. When everything belongs to everyone, nobody will take care of anything.
Andre Gide
#38. 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
#39. Welcome anything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.
Andre Gide
#40. One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.
Andre Gide
#41. 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
#42. If life were organized, there would be no need for art.
Andre Gide
#43. What seems different in yourself; that's the rare thing you possess. The one thing that gives each of us his worth, and that's just what we try to suppress. And we claim to love life.
Andre Gide
#44. The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.
Andre Gide
#45. 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
#46. An unprejudiced mind is probably the rarest thing in the world; to nonprejudice I attach the greatest value.
Andre Gide
#47. What eludes logic is the most precious element in us, and one can draw nothing from a syllogism that the mind has not put there in advance.
Andre Gide
#48. What would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.
Andre Gide
#49. 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
#50. Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.
Andre Gide
#51. Though a revolution may call itself "national," it always marks the victory of a single party.
Andre Gide
#52. Faith can move mountains; true: mountains of stupidity.
Andre Gide
#53. God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.
Andre Gide
#54. Our deeds attach themselves to us like the flame to phosphorus. They constitute our brilliance, to be sure, but only in so far as they consume us.
Andre Gide
#56. The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.
Andre Gide
#57. What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.
Andre Gide
#58. Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.
Andre Gide
#59. I do not love men: I love what devours them.
Andre Gide
#60. True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joys of others.
Andre Gide
#61. ...Gradation; gradation; and then a sudden leap...
Andre Gide
#64. Every instant of our lives is essentially irreplaceable: you must know this in order to concentrate on life.
Andre Gide
#65. I had forgotten I was alone; I sat there, waiting for nothing, oblivious to the time.
Andre Gide
#66. The world will be saved by one or two people.
Andre Gide
#67. 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
#68. The true return to nature is the definitive return to the elements-death.
Andre Gide
#69. 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
#70. Each thought becomes an anxiety in my brain. I am becoming the ugliest of all things: a busy man.
Andre Gide
#71. To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom
Andre Gide
#72. It is better to fail at your own life than to succeed at someone else's.
Andre Gide
#73. One can always find hands for a work of destruction.
Andre Gide
#74. I like life well enough to want to live it awake
Andre Gide
#75. When you have nothing to say, or to hide, there is no need to be prudent.
Andre Gide
#76. Fear of ridicule begets the worst cowardice.
Andre Gide
#77. What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.
Andre Gide
#78. When I cease to be indignant I will have begun my old age.
Andre Gide
#80. 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.
Andre Gide
#81. Each one of a pair of lovers fashions himself to meet the other's requirements - endeavors by a continual effort to resemble that idol of himself which he beholds in the other's heart ... Whoever really loves abandons all sincerity.
Andre Gide
#82. 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
#83. There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.
Andre Gide
#84. The scholar seeks truth, the artist finds.
Andre Gide
#85. Man's responsibility increases as that of the gods decreases.
Andre Gide
#86. For what use is it to forbid what we can't prevent? If books are forbidden, children read them on the sly.
Andre Gide
#87. He let Julius go. There was beginning to rise in him a feeling of profound disgust
a kind of hatred almost, of himself, of Julius, of everything.
Andre Gide
#88. How do you know that the fruit is ripe? Simply because it leaves the branch.
Andre Gide
#89. The thing I am most aware of is my limits. And this is natural; for I never, or almost never, occupy the middle of my cage; my whole being surges toward the bars.
Andre Gide
#90. Understanding is the beginning of approving.
Andre Gide
#91. Rather than recount his life as he has lived it, he must live his life as he will recount it.
Andre Gide
#92. It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.
Andre Gide
#93. 'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
Andre Gide
#94. It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves.
Andre Gide
#96. 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.
Andre Gide
#97. Often the best in us springs from the worst in us.
Andre Gide
#98. Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.
Andre Gide
#99. 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.
Andre Gide
#100. It's madness to envy other people's happiness. Happiness doesn't come of the peg, it has to be made to measure.
Andre Gide
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