01UndatedMost people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates: he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don't dare to - they don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone - that is what they suffer from - and so they don't find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia - the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything - but they don't want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value - and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.André Gide / quote ↗
03UndatedI do not want to recollect. I should be afraid of preventing the future and of allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour's freshness. It is never enough for me to have been happy. I do not believe in dead things and cannot distinguish between being no more and never having been.André Gide / quote ↗
04UndatedWhat would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.André Gide / quote ↗
05UndatedTo tell the truth, my dear count, I must own that of all nauseating human emanations, literature is one of those which disgust me most. I can see nothing in it but compromise and flattery. And I go so far as to doubt whether it can be anything else.André Gide / quote ↗
06UndatedRather than recount his life as he has lived it, he must live his life as he will recount it.André Gide / quote ↗
09UndatedIn other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring...André Gide / quote ↗
10UndatedWe prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in usAndré Gide / quote ↗
11UndatedThe secret seemed to me much more mysterious than that; it was the secret, I thought, of one who had known death; for I moved a stranger among ordinary people, like a man who has risen from the grave, and at first I merely felt rather painfully out of my element; but soon I became aware of a very different feeling.Was it pride now? Perhaps; but at any rate there was no trace of vanity mixed with it. It was rather, for the first time, the consciousness of my own worth. What separated me - distinguished me - from other people was crucial; what no one said, what no one could say but myself, that was my task to say.André Gide / quote ↗
13UndatedI hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live - contented themselves with appearing to live, and were on the verge of considering life merely as a vexatious hindrance to writing.André Gide / quote ↗
14UndatedIn a world in which everyone cheats, it's the honest man who passes for a charlatan.André Gide / quote ↗
16UndatedWhen I was younger, I used to make resolutions, which I imagined were virtuous. I was less anxious to be what I was, than to become what I wished to be. Now, I am not far from thinking that in irresolution lies the secret of not going old.André Gide / quote ↗
17UndatedThe most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.André Gide / quote ↗
18UndatedBecause it was natural, could he not see that it was marvelous? Poor creature!André Gide / quote ↗
19UndatedI say, "it seemed to me," for from the depths of my past childhood, there now awoke in me the glimmerings of a thousand lost sensations. The fact that I was once more aware of my senses enabled me to give them a half fearful recognition. Yes; my reawakened senses now remembered a whole ancient history of their own— recomposed for themselves a vanished past. They were alive! Alive! They had never ceased to live; they discovered that even during those early studious years they had been living their own latent, cunning life.André Gide / quote ↗
20UndatedPoverty makes a slave out of men. In order to eat he will accept work that gives no pleasure.André Gide / quote ↗
22UndatedThere is a germ of revolt lying in the spirit of inquiry and critical curiosity.André Gide / quote ↗
23UndatedHe let Julius go. There was beginning to rise in him a feeling of profound disgust--a kind of hatred almost, of himself, of Julius, of everything.André Gide / quote ↗
