André Gide Quotes

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.

~ André Gide

I do not love men: I love what devours them.

~ André Gide

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

~ André Gide

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.

~ André Gide

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

~ André Gide

Those who have eyes…do not know their happiness.

~ André Gide

But I think there comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass, and that the effort to revive such happiness depletes it; that nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.

~ André Gide

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

~ André Gide

He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.

~ André Gide

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.

~ André Gide

Fear of ridicule begets the worst cowardice.

~ André Gide

There's no better cure for the fear of taking after one's father, than not to know who he is.

~ André Gide

To know how to free oneself is nothing, the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom

~ André Gide

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.

~ André Gide

I have always thought that great artists were those who dared to confer the right of beauty on things so natural that people say on seeing them, Why did I never realize before that that was beautiful too?

~ André Gide

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.

~ André Gide

I am neither sad nor cheerful, the air here fills one with a kind of vague excitement and induces a state as far removed from cheerfulness as it is from sorrow, perhaps it is happiness.

~ André Gide

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

~ André Gide

Most people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates: he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don't dare to - they don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone - that is what they suffer from - and so they don't find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia - the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything - but they don't want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value - and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.

~ André Gide

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

~ André Gide

I do not want to recollect. I should be afraid of preventing the future and of allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour's freshness. It is never enough for me to have been happy. I do not believe in dead things and cannot distinguish between being no more and never having been.

~ André Gide

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

~ André Gide

Rather than recount his life as he has lived it, he must live his life as he will recount it.

~ André Gide

Nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.

~ André Gide

Nothing can make a face more impenetrable than the mask of kindliness.

~ André Gide

In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring...

~ André Gide

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

~ André Gide

The secret seemed to me much more mysterious than that; it was the secret, I thought, of one who had known death; for I moved a stranger among ordinary people, like a man who has risen from the grave, and at first I merely felt rather painfully out of my element; but soon I became aware of a very different feeling.Was it pride now? Perhaps; but at any rate there was no trace of vanity mixed with it. It was rather, for the first time, the consciousness of my own worth. What separated me - distinguished me - from other people was crucial; what no one said, what no one could say but myself, that was my task to say.

~ André Gide

Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.

~ André Gide

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.

~ André Gide

In a world in which everyone cheats, it's the honest man who passes for a charlatan.

~ André Gide

She already loved me too much to see me as I was.

~ André Gide

When I was younger, I used to make resolutions, which I 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 going old.

~ André Gide

The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.

~ André Gide

Because it was natural, could he not see that it was marvelous? Poor creature!

~ André Gide

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

~ André Gide

There is a germ of revolt lying in the spirit of inquiry and critical curiosity.

~ André Gide

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.

~ André Gide

One can always find hands for a work of destruction.

~ André Gide

Will it be here that we shall find a place which will not elude us, or which if it remains does not exert on us a culpable attraction? Or must we, leaning over the deck and watching the shores glide by, move forever onward?

~ André Gide