Andre Gide quotes:

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Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
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.
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.
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.
It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves.
Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.
Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.
To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.
A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.
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.
Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.
It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.
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.
The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.
The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.
Solitude is bearable only with God.
There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.
Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.
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.
It is better to be hated for what you are than be loved for something you are not.
Art is the collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself- and thus make yourself indispensable.
A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly
Too chaste a youth leads to a dissolute old age.
The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness?"
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.
Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessors of happiness
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.
One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.
Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.
The color of truth is gray.
I wished for nothing beyond her smile, and to walk with her thus, hand in hand, along a sun warmed, flower bordered path.
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 true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.
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.
Let every emotion be capable becoming an intoxication to you. If what you eat fails to make you drunk, it is because you are not hungry enough.
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.
Laws and rules of conduct are for the state of childhood; education is an emancipation.
It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart; then, finding sufficient sustenance in their rhythm and reveling in them at leisure, I closed the book and remained, trembling, more alive than I had thought possible, my mind numb with happiness.
How do you know that the fruit is ripe? Simply because it leaves the branch.
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.
Without mysticism man can achieve nothing great.
Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys.
The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say - because they were too obvious.
But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.
Not everyone can be an orphan.
The pettiness of a mind can be measured by the pettiness of its adoration or its blasphemy.
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.
Prejudices are the props of civilization.
In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.
Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.
He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.
I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance.
Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.
Fear of ridicule begets the worst cowardice.
Because it was natural, could he not see that it was marvelous? Poor creature!
In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring...
She already loved me too much to see me as I was.
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.
What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.
To love the truth is to refuse to let oneself be saddened by it.
We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.
Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.
The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.
Whoever starts out toward the unknown must consent to venture alone.
If the flower were not attached to its stem, it would flee at the approach of man, like the insect or the bird; for the attribute of man on the earth, at least as long as he does not better understand his role, is to worry and frighten what he is not interested in taming for utilitarian purposes. Man is skillful in mistreating everything he can use
In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.
Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.
What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.
Each of us really understands in others only those feelings he is capable of producing himself.
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.
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.
A work of art is an exaggeration.
There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
God lies ahead. I convince myself and constantly repeat to myself that: He depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.
True intelligence very readily conceives of an intelligence superior to its own; and this is why truly intelligent men are modest.
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.
The very act of sacrifice magnifies the one who sacrifices himself to the point where his sacrifice is much more costly to humanity than would have been the loss of those for whom he is sacrificing himself. But in his abnegation lies the secret of his grandeur.
The finest virtues can become deformed with age. The precise mind becomes finicky; the thrifty man, miserly; the cautious man, timorous; the man of imagination, fanciful. Even perseverance ends up in a sort of stupidity. Just as, on the other hand, being too willing to understand too many opinions, too diverse ways of seeing, constancy is lost and the mind goes astray in a restless fickleness.
It is often so: the harder it is to hear, the more a truth is worth saying.
Understanding is the beginning of approving.
With each book you write you should lose the admirers you gained with the previous one.
What thwarts us and demands of us the greatest effort is also what can teach us most.
When intelligent people pride themselves on not understanding, it is quite natural they should succeed better than fools.
Yet I'm sure there's something more to be read in a man. People dare not -- they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry -- I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don't find themselves at all. I hate this moral agoraphobia -- it's the worst kind of cowardice. You can't create something without being alone. But who's trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that's just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life.
Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. Its their way of falling.
Only fools don't contradict themselves
It is now, and in this world, that we must live.
The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers the most from its own limitations.
Sadness is a state of sin.
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.
Woe to these people who have no appetite for the very dish that their age serves up.
To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.
There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.
Nothing excellent can be done without leisure.
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.
Often the best in us springs from the worst in us.
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.
Our judgements about things vary according to the time left us to live -that we think is left us to live.
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.
When everything belongs to everyone, nobody will take care of anything.
The miser puts his gold pieces into a coffer; but as soon as the coffer is closed, it is as if it were empty.
One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.
Man's responsibility increases as that of the gods decreases.
Every perfect action is accompanied by pleasure. By that you can tell what you ought to do.
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.
There's a law in life: whenever a door closes, a new one will open.
I would like the events never to be told directly by the author, but rather to be introduced (and several times, from various angles) by those among the characters on whom they will have had any effect. I would like those events, in the account they will make of them, to appear slightly distorted; a kind of interest stems, for the reader, from the simple fact that he should need to restore. The story requires his collaboration in order to properly take shape.
Faith can move mountains; true: mountains of stupidity.
To win ones joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.

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