Quotes from Andre Gide

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?

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

Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.

Sadness is a state of sin.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

The most decisive actions of our life - I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future - are, more often than not, unconsidered.

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.

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death

There's a law in life: whenever a door closes, a new one will open.

Sin is whatever obscures the soul.

Every instant of our lives is essentially irreplaceable: you must know this in order to concentrate on life.

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

The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it.

There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.

Never have I been able to settle in life. Always seated askew, as if on the arm of a chair; ready to get up, to leave.

The most subtle art, the strongest and deepest art - supreme art - is the one that does not at first allow itself to be recognized.

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

Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself- and thus make yourself indispensable.

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

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.

It is better to fail at your own life than to succeed at someone else's.

Welcome anything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.

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