André Gide

“Most 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.”

“To 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.”

“The 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.”

“In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring...”

“I 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.”

“Rather than recount his life as he has lived it, he must live his life as he will recount it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“But I think there comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass, and that the effort to revive such happiness depletes it; that nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.”

“מה שאין הוא מה שלא יכול להיות.”

“האמן באלה שמחפשים את האמת, ולא באלה שמוצאים אותה.”

“בוויכוח, אני תמיד תומך בדעתו של המתנגד.”

“מרגע שהבינותי כי אלוהים נמצא בתהליך של התהוות, וכי התהוותו תלויה בכל אחד מאתנו, נעשיתי מוסרי מחדש.”

“באמנות כמו בכל דבר, הטוהר חשוב לי.”

“אני מכנה עיתונאות כל מה שיהיה שווה פחות מחר מאשר היום.”

“לעולם אינני כותב משפט חיובי מבלי להוסיף את המילה 'אולי'.”

“אני יכול להטיל ספק בכל, אך לא בספק עצמו.”

“אהבה היא הבטחה של אושר.”

“הרצון לדעת נולד מן הספק.”

“האדם מעניין יותר מן האנשים כולם. לא הם אלא הוא בלבד נוצר בצלם אלוהים. היחיד יקר יותר מן הכלל.”