Quotes from Andre Gide

Each thought becomes an anxiety in my brain. I am becoming the ugliest of all things: a busy man.

So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity.

Without mysticism man can achieve nothing great.

The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.

The individual man tries to escape the race. And as soon as he ceases to represent the race, he represents man.

The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced. Therefore is a word the poet must not know, which exists only in the mind.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. Its their way of falling.

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

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.

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 work of art is the exaggeration of an idea.

The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good."

There is no work of art that is without short cuts.

Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.

Not everyone can be an orphan.

Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.

How much more sensuality invites to art than does sentimentality.

A work of art is an exaggeration.

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.

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

The scholar seeks the artist finds.

Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.