André Gide Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

André Gide
A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.

André Gide
If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one's youth, one's greatest indignation would be for what one has become.

André Gide
When intelligent people pride themselves on not understanding, it is quite natural they should succeed better than fools.

André Gide
In the realm of the emotions, the real is indistinguishable from the imaginary.

André Gide
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.

André Gide
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.

André Gide
Oh, if only we could lean over the soul we love and see as in a mirror the image we cast there!

André Gide
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.

André Gide
It seems to me that had I not known Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or Freud or X or Z, I should have thought just as I did, and that I found in them rather an authorization than an awakening. Above all, they taught me to cease doubting, to cease fearing my thoughts, and to let those thoughts lead me to those lands that were not uninhabitable because after all I found them already there.

André Gide
The abominable effort to take one's sins with one to paradise.

André Gide
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.

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

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

André Gide
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.

André Gide
Often the best in us springs from the worst in us.

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

André Gide
On carelessly made or insufficient observations how many fine theories are built up which do not bear examination.

André Gide
Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always finds an inhabitant. The artist's business is to build the dwelling; as for the inhabitant, it is up to the reader to provide him.

André Gide
Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.

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

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

André Gide
The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

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

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