Quotes from Andre Gide

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.

Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.

In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.

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.

It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.

It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves.

Know thyself! A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever observes himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly.

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions.

There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.

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.

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.

Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.

~ Andre Gide, French Novelist (1869-1951)