André Gide Quotes…
André Paul Guillaume Gide ( 22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French author awarded the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. Gide’s career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars. The author of more than fifty books, at the time of his death his obituary in The New York Times described him as “France’s greatest contemporary man of letters” and “judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti.
André Gide Quotes
“Dare to be yourself”
“The color of truth is grey.”
“Please do not understand me too quickly.”
“He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.”
“Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.”
“Only fools don’t contradict themselves”
“Wisdom comes not from reason but from love.”
“Fear of ridicule begets the worst cowardice.”
André Gide Quotes
“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”
“When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice”
“Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.”
“Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. It’s their way of falling.”
“Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.”
“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
“There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.”
“Everything’s already been said, but since nobody was listening, we have to start again.”
“Better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
“We should enjoy this summer, flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one we’ll see.”
“Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.”
“The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.”
“Envying another man’s happiness is madness; you wouldn’t know what to do with it if you had it.”
“Every instant of our lives is essentially irreplaceable: you must know this in order to concentrate on life.”
“To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom”
“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.”
“After much searching I have found the thing that sets me apart: a sort of stubborn attachment to evil.”
André Gide Quotes
“I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it.”
“Art begins with resistance—at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 Quotes
