Andre Gide Quotes - Page 7

Humanity cherishes its swaddling clothes; but it shall not grow up unless it can free itself from them. Turning down his mother's breast does not make the weaned child ungrateful. ... Rise up naked, valiant; make the sheaths crack; push aside the stakes; to grow straight you need no more than the thrust of your sap and the call of the sun.

"Let the dead bury the dead." There is not a single word of Christ to which the Christian religion has paid less attention.

If life were organized, there would be no need for art.

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.

In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.

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

It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves.

Drunkenness is never anything but a substitute for happiness.

Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.

Our deeds attach themselves to us like the flame to phosphorus. They constitute our brilliance, to be sure, but only in so far as they consume us.

Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon.

Enduring fame is promised only to those writers who can offer to successive generations a substance constantly renewed; for every generation arrives upon the scene with its own particular hunger.

I advise the young to tell themselves constantly that most often it is up to them alone.

He who makes great demands upon himself is naturally inclined to make great demands on others.

Though a revolution may call itself "national," it always marks the victory of a single party.

I would like the events never to be told directly by the author, but rather to be introduced (and several times, from various angles) by those among the characters on whom they will have had any effect. I would like those events, in the account they will make of them, to appear slightly distorted; a kind of interest stems, for the reader, from the simple fact that he should need to restore. The story requires his collaboration in order to properly take shape.

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

No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart; then, finding sufficient sustenance in their rhythm and reveling in them at leisure, I closed the book and remained, trembling, more alive than I had thought possible, my mind numb with happiness.

The young people who come to me in the hope of hearing me utter a few memorable maxims are quite disappointed. Aphorisms are not my forte, I say nothing but banalities.... I listen to them and they go away delighted.

I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts.

The most beaten paths are certainly the surest, but do not hope to start much game on them.

Man's first and greatest victory must be won against the gods.

I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.

There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.

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