Andre Gide
True intelligence very readily conceives of an intelligence superior to its own; and this is why truly intelligent men are modest.Collection: Men
Nothing excellent can be done without leisure.Collection: Done
When everything belongs to everyone, nobody will take care of anything.Collection: Care
It is one of life's laws that as soon as one door closes another opens. But the tragedy is we look at the closed door and disregard the open one.Collection: Doors
He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.Collection: Respect
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.Collection: Truth Is
The scholar seeks truth, the artist finds.Collection: Truth
To love the truth is to refuse to let oneself be saddened by it.Collection: Truth
Solitude is bearable only with God.Collection: Solitude
The wise man is astonished by anything.Collection: Wise
A man thinks he owns things, and it is he who is ownedCollection: Men
The wise man is he who constantly wonders afresh.Collection: Wise
Every instant of our lives is essentially irreplaceable: you must know this in order to concentrate on life.Collection: Order
Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents only one of a thousand attitudes. You must find your own. If someone else could have done something as well as you, don’t do it. If someone else could have said something as well as you, don’t say it—or written something as well as you, don’t write it. Grow fond only of that which you can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or patiently, ah! that most irreplaceable of beings.Collection: Attitude
To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.Collection: Freedom
We should enjoy this summer, flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one we’ll see.Collection: Summer
There is no work of art that is without short cuts.Collection: Art
Obsessions of the Orient, of the desert, of its ardor and its emptiness, of the shadows of palm gardens, of the garments white and wide - obsessions where the senses go berserk, where nerves are exasperated, and which made me, at the onset of each night, believe sleep impossible.Collection: Believe
An unprejudiced mind is probably the rarest thing in the world; to nonprejudice I attach the greatest value.Collection: Mind
True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joys of others.Collection: Kindness
Are you then unable to recognize unless it has the same sound as yours?Collection: Empathy
So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity.Collection: Inspirational
Let every emotion be capable becoming an intoxication to you. If what you eat fails to make you drunk, it is because you are not hungry enough.Collection: Drunk
To be sure, theory is useful. But without warmth of heart and without love it bruises the very ones it claims to save.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Arms
One is always wrong to open a conversation with the devil, for, however he goes about it, he always insists upon having the last word.Collection: Devil
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?Collection: Heart
Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.Collection: Profound
With each book you write you should lose the admirers you gained with the previous one.Collection: Book
God lies ahead. I convince myself and constantly repeat to myself that: He depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.Collection: God
The individual man tries to escape the race. And as soon as he ceases to represent the race, he represents man.Collection: Men
An opinion, though it is original, does not necessarily differ from the accepted opinion; the important thing is that it does not try to conform to it.Collection: Important
What eludes logic is the most precious element in us, and one can draw nothing from a syllogism that the mind has not put there in advance.Collection: Mind
The itch is a mean, unconfessable, ridiculous malady; one can pity someone who is suffering ; someone who wants to scratch himself makes one laugh.Collection: Mean
Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! And without too many regrets, if possible! Those from which the sap has withdrawn. But, good Lord, what beautiful colors!Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Artist
It is essential to persuade the soldier that those he is being urged to massacre are bandits who do not deserve to live; before killing other good, decent fellows like himself, his gun would fall from his hands.Collection: Fall
Every perfect action is accompanied by pleasure. By that you can tell what you ought to do.Collection: Perfect
The true return to nature is the definitive return to the elements-death.Collection: Nature
Enduring fame is promised only to those writers who can offer to successive generations a substance constantly renewed; for every generation arrives upon the scene with its own particular hunger.Collection: Writing
"Let the dead bury the dead." There is not a single word of Christ to which the Christian religion has paid less attention.Collection: Christian
Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.Collection: Happiness
To win ones joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.Collection: Inspirational
The anxiety we have for the figure we cut, for our personage, is constantly cropping out. We are showing off and are often more concerned with making a display than with living. Whoever feels observed observes himself.Collection: Cutting
Don't think that your truth could be found by someone else.Collection: Thinking
I would like the events never to be told directly by the author, but rather to be introduced (and several times, from various angles) by those among the characters on whom they will have had any effect. I would like those events, in the account they will make of them, to appear slightly distorted; a kind of interest stems, for the reader, from the simple fact that he should need to restore. The story requires his collaboration in order to properly take shape.Collection: Reading
If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one's youth, one's greatest indignation would be for what one has become.Collection: Inspirational
If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.Collection: Writing
No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart; then, finding sufficient sustenance in their rhythm and reveling in them at leisure, I closed the book and remained, trembling, more alive than I had thought possible, my mind numb with happiness.Collection: Book