Andre Gide Quotes

235 quotes in 2096 categories

• To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.
• The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.
• Sin is whatever obscures the soul.
• It is essential to persuade the soldier that those he is being urged to massacre are bandits who do not deserve to live; before killing…
• But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.
• It is the special quality of love not to be able to remain stationary, to be obliged to increase under pain of diminishing....
• Through fear of resembling one another, through horror of having to submit, through uncertainty as well, through skepticism and complexity, there is a multitude of…
• 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…
• To win ones joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.
• Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.
• 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…
• 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…
• The individual never asserts himself more than when he forgets himself.
• Life never presents us with anything which may not be looked upon as a fresh starting point, no less than as a termination.
• Nothing is good for everyone, but only relatively to some people.
• Without mysticism man can achieve nothing great.
• Faith can move mountains; true: mountains of stupidity.
• The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers the most from its own limitations.
• Sadness is a state of sin.
• In order to judge properly, one must get away somewhat from what one is judging, after having loved it. This is true of countries, of…

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