André Gide Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.

André Gide
What cleanliness everywhere! You dare not throw your cigarette into the lake. No graffiti in the urinals. Switzerland is proud of this; but I believe this is just what she lacks: manure.

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

André Gide
In my present insistence on high standards you will see that there is less self-indulgence than resolve and application. I do not let the Christian monopolize the ideal of perfection. I have my own virtue, which I am constantly cultivating and refining by teaching myself not to tolerate in me or my surroundings anything but the exquisite.

André Gide
At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, 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.

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

André Gide
The great secret of Stendhal, his great shrewdness, consisted in writing at once…thought charged with emotion.

André Gide
Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

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

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

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

André Gide
One must allow others to be right, it consoles them for not being anything else.

André Gide
Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.

André Gide
Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.

André Gide
O my dearest and most lovable thought, why should I try further to legitimize your birth?

André Gide
Sin is whatever obscures the soul.

André Gide
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.

André Gide
One can't correct what one does. It's the power of revising that makes writing such a colourless affair.

André Gide
The only really Christian art is that which, like St. Francis, does not fear being wedded to poverty. This rises far above art-as-ornament.

André Gide
The whole effect of Christianity was to transfer the drama onto the moral plane.

André Gide
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

André Gide
What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.

André Gide
Ah, this, that we call happiness, how intimate a part of the soul it is, and of what little importance are the outside elements which seem to go to its making!

André Gide
Let every emotion be capable of becoming an intoxication to you. If what you eat fails to make you drunk, it is because you are not hungry enough.

André Gide