André Gide

"Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason."

"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."

"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."

"Therefore' is a word the poet must not know."

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

"There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome."

"Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor."

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

"The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity."

"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."

"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."

"The color of truth is gray."

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

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

"What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told."

"Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness."

"If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one's youth one's greatest indignation would be for what one has become."

"Seize from every moment its unique novelty and do not prepare your joys."

"It is now and in this world that we must live."

"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."