Top 256 Quotes & Sayings by Andre Gide - Page 3

The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

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

Laws and rules of conduct are for the state of childhood; education is an emancipation.

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.

The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love.

One should want only one thing and want it constantly. Then one is sure of getting it. But I desire everything, and consequently get nothing.

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

Man is extraordinarily clever in preventing himself from being happy; it would seem that the less able he is to endure misfortune the more apt he is to attach himself to it.

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.

If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.

Enduring fame is promised only to those writers who can offer to successive generations a substance constantly renewed; for every generation arrives upon the scene with its own particular hunger.

Through fear of resembling one another, through horror of having to submit, through uncertainty as well, through skepticism and complexity, there is a multitude of individual little beliefs for the triumph of strange little individuals.

In order to judge properly, one must get away somewhat from what one is judging, after having loved it. This is true of countries, of persons, and of oneself.

The pettiness of a mind can be measured by the pettiness of its adoration or its blasphemy.

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.

The difficulty comes from this, that Christianity (Christian orthodoxy) is exclusive and that belief in its truth excludes belief in any other truth. It does not absorb; it repulses.

Our judgements about things vary according to the time left us to live -that we think is left us to live.

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

Our deeds attach themselves to us like the flame to phosphorus. They constitute our brilliance, to be sure, but only in so far as they consume us.

If life were organized, there would be no need for art.

The world will be saved by one or two people.

The young people who come to me in the hope of hearing me utter a few memorable maxims are quite disappointed. Aphorisms are not my forte, I say nothing but banalities.... I listen to them and they go away delighted.

The very act of sacrifice magnifies the one who sacrifices himself to the point where his sacrifice is much more costly to humanity than would have been the loss of those for whom he is sacrificing himself. But in his abnegation lies the secret of his grandeur.

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

Woe to these people who have no appetite for the very dish that their age serves up.

Believe in your strength and your vision. Learn to repeat to yourself, 'It all depends on me'.

The most subtle art, the strongest and deepest art - supreme art - is the one that does not at first allow itself to be recognized.

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.

When you have nothing to say, or to hide, there is no need to be prudent.

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.

Drunkenness is never anything but a substitute for happiness.

Great minds tend toward banality. It is the noblest effort of individualism. But it implies a sort of modesty, which is so rare that it is scarcely found except in the greatest, or in beggars.

"Let the dead bury the dead." There is not a single word of Christ to which the Christian religion has paid less attention.

Man's first and greatest victory must be won against the gods.

Clear and precise ideas are the most dangerous, for one does not dare to change them.

Long only for what you have.

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

To win ones joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.

The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.

Prejudices are the props of civilization.

How much more sensuality invites to art than does sentimentality.

Mozart's joy is made of serenity, and a phrase of his music is like a calm thought; his simplicity is merely purity. It is a crystalline thing in which all the emotions play a role, but as if already celestially transposed. Moderation consists in feeling emotions as the angels do.

An experience teaches only the good observer; but far from seeking a lesson in it, everyone looks for an argument in experience, and everyone interprets the conclusion in his own way.

One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.

Envying another man's happiness is madness; you wouldn't know what to do with it if you had it.

It would be wisest not to worry too much about the sterile periods. They ventilate the subject and instill into it the reality of daily life.

A work of art is an exaggeration.

I find just as much profit in cultivating my hates as my loves.

The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea.

Don't think that your truth could be found by someone else.

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

What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - and thus make yourself indispensable.

Please do not understand me too quickly.

He who makes great demands upon himself is naturally inclined to make great demands on others.

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

I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.

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

Though a revolution may call itself "national," it always marks the victory of a single party.

The great artist is one whom constraint exalts, for whom the obstacle is a springboard.

The most beaten paths are certainly the surest, but do not hope to start much game on them.