Andre Gide Quotes - Page 3

Sin is whatever obscures the soul.

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

Do not scorn little victories.

It is better to fail at your own life than to succeed at someone else's.

Often the best in us springs from the worst in us.

How do you know that the fruit is ripe? Simply because it leaves the branch.

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

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.

But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.

Understand that the only possession of any value is life.

What thwarts us and demands of us the greatest effort is also what can teach us most.

The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions.

It is good to follow one's own bent, so long as it leads upward.

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

Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.

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

Wisdom comes not from reason but from love.

It is often so: the harder it is to hear, the more a truth is worth saying.

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.

Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys.

Faith can move mountains; true: mountains of stupidity.

Yet I'm sure there's something more to be read in a man. People dare not -- they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry -- I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don't find themselves at all. I hate this moral agoraphobia -- it's the worst kind of cowardice. You can't create something without being alone. But who's trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that's just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life.

A desire for truth is by no means a need for certitude and it would be unwise to confuse one with the other.

Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.

The thing I am most aware of is my limits. And this is natural; for I never, or almost never, occupy the middle of my cage; my whole being surges toward the bars.