André Gide Quotes

The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.

I wished for nothing beyond her smile, and to walk with her thus, hand in hand, along a sun warmed, flower bordered path.

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.

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

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

Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents only one of a thousand attitudes. You must find your own. If someone else could have done something as well as you, don’t do it. If someone else could have said something as well as you, don’t say it — or written something as well as you, don’t write it. Grow fond only of that which you can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or patiently, ah! that most irreplaceable of beings.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.

The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.

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

Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.

Poverty makes a slave out of men. In order to eat he will accept work that gives no pleasure.

ما أكثر الأشياء التي كان من السهل الإقدام عليها لولا تلك الاعتراضات التي يتفنن الانسان في ابتكارها لنفسه وكثيرا ما حيل بيننا وبين هذا العمل أو ذاك لأننا قد سمعنا صوتا من داخلنا او من المحيطين بنا يقول لنا :اننا لن نقدر عليه
ولو لم نسمع هذا الصوت ونستجيب له لكشفت لنا التجربة عن نيله والفوز به

I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it.

Parce que ma bouche se tait, pensez-vous que mon coeur se repose?