Andre Gide Quotes

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

A man thinks he owns things, and it is he who is owned

Understand that the only possession of any value is life.

The difficulty comes from this, that Christianity (Christian orthodoxy) is exclusive and that belief in its truth excludes belief in any other truth. It does not absorb; it repulses.

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

Prejudices are the props of civilization.

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

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

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

The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea.

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

Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.

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

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

Each of us really understands in others only those feelings he is capable of producing himself.

It is with fine sentiments that bad literature is made. Descend to the bottom of the well if you wish to see the stars.

The scholar seeks truth, the artist finds.

When I cease to be indignant I will have begun my old age.

Generally among intelligent people are found nothing but paralytics and among men of action nothing but fools.

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.”

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

I have no use for knowledge that has not been preceded by a sensation

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

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

Man is extraordinarily clever in preventing himself from being happy; it would seem that the less able he is to endure misfortune the more apt he is to attach himself to it.

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.

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.

If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.

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

Man's first and greatest victory must be won against the gods.

Other people's appetites easily appear excessive when one doesn't share them.

The most beaten paths are certainly the surest, but do not hope to start much game on them.

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

Please do not understand me too quickly.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it.

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

Nothing blocks happiness like happiness remembered.

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.

Man: The most complex of beings, and thus the most dependent of beings. On all that made you up, you depend.

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

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.

Obtain from yourself all that makes complaining useless. No longer implore from others what you yourself can obtain.

Nothing is good for everyone, but only relatively to some people.

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.