Andre Gide Quotes

What would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.

There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.

Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.

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.

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

Drunkenness is never anything but a substitute for happiness.

By the time a philospher answers a question weve usually forgotten what was asked.

If life were organized, there would be no need for art.

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

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

The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.

Great minds tend toward banality. It is the noblest effort of individualism. But it implies a sort of modesty, which is so rare that it is scarcely found except in the greatest, or in beggars.

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

I gazed at myself, no longer with shame, but with joy. I felt, if not exactly strong, then at least potentially so, harmonious, sensuous, almost beautiful.

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

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

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

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

Look! I have here a number of white pebbles. I let them soak in the shade, then hold them in the hollow of my hand and wait until their soothing coolness is exhausted. Then I begin once more, changing the pebbles and putting back those that have lost their coolness to soak in the shade again ... Time passes and the evening comes on ... Take me away; I cannot move of myself. Something in my will is broken.

Life was nothing other than what came and went with each passing moment.

There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection.

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

Man's responsibility increases as that of the gods decreases.

Nothing blocks happiness like happiness remembered.

Not everyone can be an orphan.

Obsessions of the Orient, of the desert, of its ardor and its emptiness, of the shadows of palm gardens, of the garments white and wide - obsessions where the senses go berserk, where nerves are exasperated, and which made me, at the onset of each night, believe sleep impossible.

The historians criticized a tendency, as they phrased it, to too rapid generalization. Other people blamed my method; and those who complimented me were those who understood me least.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

What a melancholy day!" I said. "Aren't you bored?"

"Not particularly. I am reading.

Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself- and thus make yourself indispensable.

And suddenly I was seized with a desire, a craving, something more furious and more imperious than I had ever felt before - to live! I want to live! I will live. I clenched my teeth, my hands, concentrated my whole being in this wild, grief-stricken endeavour towards existence.

Sadness is a state of sin.

Do you know why our poetry today and especially our philosophy are such dead issues? Because they've cut themselves off from life. Now, Greece idealized on life's own level: an artist's life was already a poetic achievement; a philosopher's life was an enactment of his philosophy; and when they were a part of life that way, instead of ignoring each other, philosophy could nourish poetry, poetry express philosophy, and together achieve an admirable persuasiveness. Today beauty no longer acts; and action no longer bothers about being beautiful; and wisdom operates on the sidelines.

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.

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

Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.

To be sure, theory is useful. But without warmth of heart and without love it bruises the very ones it claims to save.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Poverty makes a slave out of men. In order to eat he will accept work that gives no pleasure.

The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.

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

The miser puts his gold pieces into a coffer; but as soon as the coffer is closed, it is as if it were empty.

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

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.

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 public always prefers to be reassured. There are those whose job this is. There are only too many.

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

True intelligence very readily conceives of an intelligence superior to its own; and this is why truly intelligent men are modest.

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

The wise man is he who constantly wonders afresh.

Please do not understand me too quickly.

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

One can always find hands for a work of destruction.

The scholar seeks truth, the artist finds.

I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live - contented themselves with appearing to live, and were on the verge of considering life merely as a vexatious hindrance to writing.

Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.

What was doubly disconcerting for me was that he showed such extraordinary and precocious insight in describing his own feelings that I felt he was making my own confession.

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

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

Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

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

And who shall say how many passions and how many hostile thoughts may live together in the mind of man?

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

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

The pettiness of a mind can be measured by the pettiness of its adoration or its blasphemy.

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

There are admirable potentialities in every human being.

Nothing excellent can be done without leisure.

To love the truth is to refuse to let oneself be saddened by it.

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

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.

What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.

Those [who] assiduously fabricate for themselves a self-conscious originality, and after having made a choice of certain practices, their principal preoccupation is never to depart from them, to remain for ever on their guard and allow themselves not a moment's relaxation.

Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, but lacks imagination and deep self-expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship.

Sin is whatever obscures the soul.

I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance.

On ne découvre pas de terre nouvelle sans consentir à perdre de vue, d'abord et longtemps, tout rivage.

(One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.)

The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love.

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.

Atheism. There is not a single exalting and emancipating influence that does not in turn become inhibitory.

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

The truth is, I hoped the cure would dislike me. I tried to think of disagreeable things to say to him
I could hit on nothing that wasn't charming. It's wonderful how hard I find it not to be fascinating.

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.

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.

I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.

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.

I have a horror of rest; possessions encourage one to indulge in it, and there's nothing like security for making one fall asleep; I like life well enough to live it awake, and so, in the very midst of my riches, I maintain the sensation of a state of precariousness, by which means I aggravate, or at any rate intensify, my life. I will not say I like danger, but I like life to be hazardous, and I want it to demand at every moment the whole of my courage, my happiness, my health ...

One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.

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