André Gide Quotes

The self requires a story.

[Marceline] sensed already what I was struggling to discover; and when I reproached her for believing too often in the virtues she herself had invented in the people we knew, she replied: ‘You’re never satisfied until you’ve made them reveal some vice. Don’t you realize that our own eyes magnify and exaggerate whatever they happen to see — that we make anyone become what we claim he is?’

I might have wished she were wrong, but I had to admit that to me each man’s worst instinct seemed the most sincere. Then, what was it I called sincerity?

The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death's reach.

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

Take me away from here and give me some reason for living. I have none left. I have freed myself. That may be. But what does it signify? This objectless liberty is a burden to me.

I hated the homes, the families, all the places where man thinks to find rest.

What would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.

One imagines one possesses and in reality one is possessed.

A land liberated from works of art. I despise those who can acknowledge beauty only when it’s already transcribed, interpreted. One thing admirable about the Arabs: they live their art, they sing and scatter it, from day to day; they don’t cling to it, they don’t embalm it in works. Which is the cause and the effect of the absence of great artists. I have always believed the great artists are the ones who dare entitle to beauty things so natural that when they’re seen afterward people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?...

L'analyse psychologique a perdu pour moi tout intérêt du jour où je me suis avisé que l'homme éprouve ce qu'il s'imagine éprouver. De là à penser qu'il s'imagine éprouver ce qu'il éprouve... Je le vois bien avec mon amour : entre aimer Laura et m'imaginer que je l'aime - entre m'imaginer que je l'aime moins, et l'aimer moins, quel dieu verrait la différence ? Dans le domaine des sentiments, le réel ne se distingue pas de l'imaginaire. Et s'il suffit d'imaginer qu'on aime pour aimer, ainsi suffit-il de se dire qu'on imagine aimer, quand on aime, pour aussitôt aimer un peu moins, et même pour se détacher un peu de ce qu'on aime - ou pour en détacher quelques cristaux. Mais pour se dire cela ne faut-il pas déjà aimer un peu moins ?

"I say, "it seemed to me," for from the depths of my past childhood, there now awoke in me the glimmerings of a thousand lost sensations. The fact that I was once more aware of my senses enabled me to give them a half fearful recognition. Yes; my reawakened senses now remembered a whole ancient history of their own — recomposed for themselves a vanished past. They were alive! Alive! They had never ceased to live; they discovered that even during those early studious years they had been living their own latent, cunning life."

Desigur, trebuie să ai o anumită experienţă a vieţii pentru a înţelege că nu poţi nădăjdui să obţii lucrurile pe care le doreşti decît riscîndu-le pe cele la care ţii mai mult.

Être aveugle pour se croire heureux. Croire qu'on y voit clair pour ne pas chercher à y voir puisque : L'on ne peut se voir que malheureux.

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 was still filled as before with an evil curiosity. There was a mystery about the existence of each one of them. I always felt that a part of their lives was concealed. What did they do when I was not there? I refused to believe that they had not better ways of amusing themselves. And I credited each of them with a secret which I pertinaciously tried to discover.