André Gide Quotes

Life was nothing other than what came and went with each passing moment.

Those who complimented me were those who understood me the least.

Will it be here that we shall find a place which will not elude us, or which if it remains does not exert on us a culpable attraction? Or must we, leaning over the deck and watching the shores glide by, move forever onward?

اليرقة التي تبحث عن معرفة ذاتها لن تتحول أبدا إلى فراشة.

For what use is it to forbid what we can't prevent? If books are forbidden, children read them on the sly.

Je n'aime pas les hommes; j'aime ce qui les dévore.

A man thinks he owns things, and it is he who is owned

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

Existing is occupation enough.

After much searching I have found the thing that sets me apart: a sort of stubborn attachment to evil.

Aynı zamanda hem içten olmak, hem de öyle görünmek olası değil.

O my dearest and most lovable thought, why should I try further to legitimize your birth?

At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles—wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.

If this was happiness, I know that I wanted to hold it like one wants in vain to hold running water in joined hands. But I was already feeling alongside this happiness something other than happiness which was covering my love like the coloring of autumn.

At this solemn moment, he would like to have some rare, sublime experience — hear a message from the world beyond — send his thought flying into ethereal regions, inaccessible to mortal senses. But no! his thought remains obstinately grovelling on the earth;