André Gide Quotes

C'est avec de beaux sentiments qu'on fait de la mauvaise littérature.

I can't expect others to share my virtues. It's good enough for me if they share my vices.

"When I got back to Marceline, I did not conceal from her how tedious I found all these acquaintances.
"They are all alike," I said to her. "When I talk to one, I feel as if I were talking to the whole lot."
"But, my dear," said Marceline, "you can't expect each of them to be different from the others."
"The greater their likeness to each other, the more unlike they are to me.

It seems to me that had I not known Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or Freud or X or Z, I should have thought just as I did, and that I found in them rather an authorization than an awakening. Above all, they taught me to cease doubting, to cease fearing my thoughts, and to let those thoughts lead me to those lands that were not uninhabitable because after all I found them already there.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

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

We who would seek new land must be willing to sacrifice the sight of shore for a long, long time.

Nu ţin cu orice preţ să parvin, mi-a spus cu un zâmbet fermecător, dar ţin ca ideile pentru care lupt să izbîndească.

Translation: To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.

It is better to be hated for what you are than be loved for something you are not.

Because it was natural, could he not see that it was marvelous? Poor creature!

There is a germ of revolt lying in the spirit of inquiry and critical curiosity.

"Oh," I thought, "without a doubt, everything in my life is falling to pieces. Nothing that my hand grasps can my hand hold."

Most people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates: he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don't dare to - they don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone - that is what they suffer from - and so they don't find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia - the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything - but they don't want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value - and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.

And suddenly I was seized with a desire, a craving, something more furious and more imperious than I had ever felt before — to live! I want to live! I will live. I clenched my teeth, my hands, concentrated my whole being in this wild, grief-stricken endeavour towards existence.