Andre Gide Quotes - Page 8

The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers the most from its own limitations.

True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joys of others.

Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for so long as that?...And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?

I prefer granting with a good grace what I know I shan't be able to prevent.

Man: The most complex of beings, and thus the most dependent of beings. On all that made you up, you depend.

Nothing is good for everyone, but only relatively to some people.

The only really Christian art is that which, like St. Francis, does not fear being wedded to poverty. This rises far above art-as-ornament.

There is a law in life: When one door closes to us another one opens.

The truth is, I hoped the cure would dislike me. I tried to think of disagreeable things to say to him -- I could hit on nothing that wasn't charming. It's wonderful how hard I find it not to be fascinating.

Nothing blocks happiness like happiness remembered.

Without mysticism man can achieve nothing great.

At times is it seems that I am living my life backward, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles. Wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.

Not everyone can be an orphan.

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

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.

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

I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance.

Sadness is a state of sin.

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.

The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea.

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

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.

Too chaste a youth leads to a dissolute old age.

Most often it happens that one attributes to others only the feelings of which one is capable oneself.

Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, but lacks imagination and deep self-expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship.