Andre Gide Quotes - Page 6

Prejudices are the props of civilization.

It seems to me that had I not known Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or Freud or X or Z, I should have thought just as I did, and that I found in them rather an authorization than an awakening. Above all, they taught me to cease doubting, to cease fearing my thoughts, and to let those thoughts lead me to those lands that were not uninhabitable because after all I found them already there .

I do not love men: I love what devours them.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.

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

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

The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

An experience teaches only the good observer; but far from seeking a lesson in it, everyone looks for an argument in experience, and everyone interprets the conclusion in his own way.

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

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

The anxiety we have for the figure we cut, for our personage, is constantly cropping out. We are showing off and are often more concerned with making a display than with living. Whoever feels observed observes himself.

The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love.

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.

The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, “seeing that his work was good.”

When you have nothing to say, or to hide, there is no need to be prudent.

A work of art is an exaggeration.

Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always finds an inhabitant. The artist's business is to build the dwelling; as for the inhabitant, it is up to the reader to provide him.

To win ones joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.

If only we could lean over the soul we love and see as in a mirror the image we cast!

From the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair.

You have to let other people be right' was his answer to their insults. 'It consoles them for not being anything else.

Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.

Other people's appetites easily appear excessive when one doesn't share them.

One should want only one thing and want it constantly. Then one is sure of getting it. But I desire everything, and consequently get nothing.