Top 200 André Gide Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.”

— André Gide

152. “Whither should we aim if not towards God?”

— André Gide

153. “Chastity more rarely follows fear, or a resolution, or a vow, than it is the mere effect of lack of appetite and, sometimes even, of distaste.”

— André Gide

154. “Life never presents us with anything which may not be looked upon as a fresh starting point, no less than as a termination.”

— André Gide

155. “Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling place always finds an inhabitant.”

— André Gide

156. “Prejudices are the props of civilization.”

— André Gide

157. “God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.”

— André Gide

158. “The individual person is more interesting than people in general; he and not they is the one whom God created in His image.”

— André Gide

159. “With each book you write you should lose the admirers you gained with the previous one.”

— André Gide

160. “Sadness is a state of sin.”

— André Gide

161. “Obtain from yourself all that makes complaining useless. No longer implore from others what you yourself can obtain.”

— André Gide

162. “What seems different in yourself; that’s the rare thing you possess. The one thing that gives each of us his worth, and that’s just what we try to suppress. And we claim to love life.”

— André Gide

163. “They establish distinctions and reserves which I cannot apply to myself, for 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.”

— André Gide

164. “The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions.”

— André Gide

165. “It is not becoming to lay to virtue the weariness of old age.”

— André Gide

166. “Woe to these people who have no appetite for the very dish that their age serves up.”

— André Gide

167. “There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection.”

— André Gide

168. “Let every emotion be capable becoming an intoxication to you. If what you eat fails to make you drunk, it is because you are not hungry enough.”

— André Gide

169. “If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.”

— André Gide

170. “To what a degree the same past can leave different marks – and especially admit of different interpretations.”

— André Gide

171. “I prefer granting with a good grace what I know I shan’t be able to prevent.”

— André Gide

172. “We call “happiness” a certain set of circumstances that makes joy possible. But we call joy that state of mind and emotions that needs nothing to feel happy.”

— André Gide

173. “Man’s responsibility increases as that of the gods decreases.”

— André Gide

174. “What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.”

— André Gide

175. “The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness?”

— André Gide

176. “It is good to follow one’s own bent, so long as it leads upward.”

— André Gide

177. “It is the special quality of love not to be able to remain stationary, to be obliged to increase under pain of diminishing...”

— André Gide

178. “What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.”

— André Gide

179. “Understand that the only possession of any value is life.”

— André Gide

180. “No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.”

— André Gide

181. “True eloquence forgoes eloquence.”

— André Gide

182. “We no longer admit any other truth than that which is expedient; for there is no worse error than the truth that may weaken the arm that is fighting.”

— André Gide

183. “Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.”

— André Gide

184. “It would be wisest not to worry too much about the sterile periods. They ventilate the subject and instill into it the reality of daily life.”

— André Gide

185. “The itch is a mean, unconfessable, ridiculous malady; one can pity someone who is suffering ; someone who wants to scratch himself makes one laugh.”

— André Gide

186. “One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.”

— André Gide

187. “We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us.”

— André Gide

188. “The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one’s own would be a sorry limitation.”

— André Gide

189. “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.”

— André Gide

190. “An opinion, though it is original, does not necessarily differ from the accepted opinion; the important thing is that it does not try to conform to it.”

— André Gide

191. “I find just as much profit in cultivating my hates as my loves.”

— André Gide

192. “To be sure, theory is useful. But without warmth of heart and without love it bruises the very ones it claims to save.”

— André Gide

193. “If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one’s youth, one’s greatest indignation would be for what one has become.”

— André Gide

194. “The fear of finding oneself alone – that is what they suffer from – and so they don’t find themselves at all.”

— André Gide

195. “What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.”

— André Gide

196. “The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.”

— André Gide

197. “It is only through restraint that man can manage not to suppress himself.”

— André Gide

198. “Atheism. There is not a single exalting and emancipating influence that does not in turn become inhibitory.”

— André Gide

199. “The great artist is one whom constraint exalts, for whom the obstacle is a springboard.”

— André Gide

200. “An artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.”

— André Gide