Andre Gide (1869 – 1951)
French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947.
Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always finds an inhabitant. The artist’s business is to build the dwelling; as for the inhabitant, it is up to the reader to provide him.
O my dearest and most lovable thought, why should I try further to legitimize your birth?
True intelligence very readily conceives of an intelligence superior to its own; and this is why truly intelligent men are modest.
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.
The abominable effort to take one’s sins with one to paradise.
Familles, je vous hais! foyers clos; portes refermées; possessions jalouses du bonheur.
Savoir se libérer n'est rien; l'ardu, c'est savoir ?tre libre.
The only really Christian art is that which, like St. Francis, does not fear being wedded to poverty. This rises far above art-as-ornament.
What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself — and thus make yourself indispensable.
Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon.
Often the best in us springs from the worst in us.
Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.
At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles—wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.
When intelligent people pride themselves on not understanding, it is quite natural they should succeed better than fools.
The finest virtues can become deformed with age. The precise mind becomes finicky; the thrifty man, miserly; the cautious man, timorous; the man of imagination, fanciful. Even perseverance ends up in a sort of stupidity. Just as, on the other hand, being too willing to understand too many opinions, too diverse ways of seeing, constancy is lost and the mind goes astray in a restless fickleness.