Explore Quotes by Andre Gide

The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it.

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.

Please do not understand me too quickly.

Fear of ridicule begets the worst cowardice.

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

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.

Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself- and thus make yourself indispensable.

Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for so long as that?...And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?

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

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 loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it.

You have to let other people be right' was his answer to their insults. 'It consoles them for not being anything else.

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.

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.