Top 200 André Gide Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Of some forty families I have been able to observe, I know hardly four in which the parents do not act in such a way that nothing would be more desirable for the child than to escape their influence.”

— André Gide

152. “Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.”

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

156. “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

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

159. “Prejudices are the props of civilization.”

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

161. “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

162. “Sadness is a state of sin.”

— André Gide

163. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— André Gide

169. “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

170. “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

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

174. “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

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

179. “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

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

— André Gide

181. “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

182. “True eloquence forgoes eloquence.”

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

184. “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

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

— André Gide

186. “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

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

— André Gide

188. “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

189. “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

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

— André Gide

191. “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

192. “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

193. “Great minds tend toward banality. It is the noblest effort of individualism. But it implies a sort of modesty, which is so rare that it is scarcely found except in the greatest, or in beggars.”

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide

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

— André Gide