André Gide Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

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

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
A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.

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 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
There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.

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
Drunkenness is never anything but a substitute for happiness.

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

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

André Gide
The public always prefers to be reassured. There are those whose job this is. There are only too many.

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
'Panem et circenses' cried the Roman mob; bread first, games next. The free play of art cannot be enjoyed on an empty stomach. Only after the dinner do we bring the artist onto the stage. His function is not to nourish but to intoxicate.

André Gide
Why have you not understood that all happiness is a chance encounter and that every moment presents itself to you like a beggar by the roadside?

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

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

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
It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

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

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
There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.

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

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

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

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

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

André Gide