Quotes from Andre Gide

If your target as a Muslim artist, writer or speaker is to target only Muslims you need to rethink your plan.

Oh, I thought, without a doubt, everything in my life is falling to pieces. Nothing that my hand grasps can my hand hold.

I looked at myself in the mirror and didn't like what I saw.

For what use is it to forbid what we can't prevent? If books are forbidden, children read them on the sly.

Everyone was good at talking about day-to-day events, but no one ever looked at what motivated them.

Je n'aime pas les hommes; j'aime ce qui les dévore.

What would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.

Que ton désir soit de l'amour, et que ta possession soit amoureuse.

We who would seek new land must be willing to sacrifice the sight of shore for a long, long time.

The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes.

I have always thought that great artists were those who dared to confer the right of beauty on things so natural that people say on seeing them, Why did I never realize before that that was beautiful too?

El color de la verdad es gris.

No estoy ni triste ni alegre; este aire de aquí te llena de una muy vaga exaltación y te hace conocer un estado que parece tan lejano de la alegría como de la pena; quizá esto sea la felicidad.

Wild animals passed on their way under the leaves; each track was an arterial road; and when I stooped and looked at the earth close to, I saw, from leaf to leaf and flower to flower, a moving host of insects.

It's madness to envy other people's happiness. Happiness doesn't come of the peg, it has to be made to measure.

La tristesse est une complication. Jamais je ne cherchais à analyser mon bonheur. ... Et je me demande à present si c'est bien le bonheur que je souhaite ou plutôt l'acheminement vers le bonheur.

And who shall say how many passions and how many hostile thoughts may live together in the mind of man?

C'est dans l'extraordinaire que je me sens le plus naturel.

I had resigned my temporary lectureship—thankless, dreary work, from which I would be suddenly distracted by the slightest song, the slightest sound coming from the country outside; in every passing cry I heard an invitation. How often I have leapt from my reading and run to the window to see—nothing pass by! How often I have hurried out of doors. . . The only attention I found possible was that of my five senses.

Each one of a pair of lovers fashions himself to meet the other's requirements—endeavors by a continual effort to resemble that idol of himself which he beholds in the other's heart.... Whoever really loves abandons all sincerity.

My eyes filled with tears and I wept long and hard, unable, and unwilling, to stop.

I am not sure whether I altogether understand you. You make me curious. I don't much care about talking, but I should like to talk to you.

On ne peut être à la fois sincère et le paraître.

How happy Ménalque is, I thought, since he has nothing! As for me, I am suffering because I want to conserve things. What importance is all this in the end?