André Gide Quotes

Dare to be yourself. I must underline that in my head too.

Don’t ever do anything through affectation or to make people like you or through imitation or for the pleasure of contradicting.

Я не могу от всех требовать своих добродетелей. Хорошо уже, если я нахожу в них свои пороки.

Those [who] assiduously fabricate for themselves a self-conscious originality, and after having made a choice of certain practices, their principal preoccupation is never to depart from them, to remain for ever on their guard and allow themselves not a moment's relaxation.

In my present insistence on high standards you will see that there is less self-indulgence than resolve and application. I do not let the Christian monopolize the ideal of perfection. I have my own virtue, which I am constantly cultivating and refining by teaching myself not to tolerate in me or my surroundings anything but the exquisite.

Bărbatul nu-i decât un copil care a îmbătrânit.

Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.

Je ne me sens jamais vivre plus intensément que quand je m'échappe à moi-même pour devenir n'importe qui.

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

I have no use for knowledge that has not been preceded by a sensation

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.

I do not want to recollect. I should be afraid of preventing the future and of allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour's freshness. It is never enough for me to have been happy. I do not believe in dead things and cannot distinguish between being no more and never having been.

Le péché, c'est ce qui obscurcit l'âme.

هیچ چیز به اندازه خاطره خوشبختی مانع
خوشبختی نیست
(رذل)

Words are traitors, for language tends to impose more logic than there is logic in life, and that the most precious in us is that which remains unexpressed.

The abominable effort to take one's sins with one to paradise.