Quotes By Andre Gide

Art is the collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

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

No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.

The color of truth is gray.

It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.

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.

Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.

What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself-and thus make yourself indispensable.

Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.

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

There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.

It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.

The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say - because they were too obvious.

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

Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.

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

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

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.

To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.

It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

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

The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

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

Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

Not everyone can be an orphan.