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.
– Andre Gide
The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with
sincerity.
– Andre Gide
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
– Andre Gide
Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this
all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.
– Andre Gide
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.
– Andre Gide
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
– Andre Gide
Fear of ridicule begets the worst cowardice.
– Andre Gide
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.
– Andre Gide
Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.
– Andre Gide
Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys.
– Andre Gide
Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death.
– Andre Gide
Obtain from yourself all that makes complaining useless. No longer implore from others what
you yourself can obtain.
– Andre Gide
The color of truth is grey.
– Andre Gide
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
– Andre Gide
There are admirable potentialities in every human being. Believe in your strength and your
youth. Learn to repeat endlessly to yourself, “It all depends on me.”
– Andre Gide
Envying another man’s happiness is madness; you wouldn’t know what to do with it if you had
it.
– Andre Gide
So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity.
– Andre Gide
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him
and travel in his company.
– Andre Gide
Whoever starts out toward the unknown must consent to venture alone.
– Andre Gide
Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.
– Andre Gide
But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old
habits.
– Andre Gide
Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. It’s their way of falling.
– Andre Gide
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.
– Andre Gide
I will not say I like danger, but I like life to be hazardous, and I want to demand at every
moment the whole of my courage, my happiness, my health.
– Andre Gide
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
– Andre Gide
Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes.
– Andre Gide
The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to
say – because they were too obvious.
– Andre Gide
Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.
– Andre Gide
There are different kinds of love, but they all have the same aim: possession.
– Andre Gide
God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.
– Andre Gide
The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.
– Andre Gide
It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves – in finding
themselves.
– Andre Gide
Sin is whatever obscures the soul.
– Andre Gide
Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what
someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you
feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most
irreplaceable of beings.
– Andre Gide
Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself – and thus make yourself
indispensable.
– Andre Gide
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and
beginning all over again.
– Andre Gide
Man is more interesting than men… Each one is more precious than all.
– Andre Gide
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
– Andre Gide