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The young people who come to me in the hope of hearing me utter a few memorable maxims are quite disappointed. Aphorisms are not my forte, I say nothing but banalities.... I listen to them and they go away delighted.

Andre Gide

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Andre Gide
Age: 82 †
Born: 1869
Born: November 22
Died: 1951
Died: December 19
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Film Producer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Prosaist
Translator
Travel Writer
Writer
Paris
France
André Paul Guillaume Gide
Andre Gide
Andre Paul Guillaume Gide
Away
Delighted
Young
Memorable
Banalities
Come
Disappointed
Aphorisms
Nothing
Hearing
Forte
People
Listening
Banality
Listen
Aphorism
Quite
Maxims
Hope
Utter

More quotes by Andre Gide

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Nothing excellent can be done without leisure.
Andre Gide
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There are admirable potentialities in every human being.
Andre Gide
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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.
Andre Gide
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I owe much to my friends but, all things considered, it strikes me that I owe even more to my enemies. The real person springs life under a sting even better than under a caress.
Andre Gide
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An artist cannot get along without a public and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.
Andre Gide
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Are you then unable to recognize unless it has the same sound as yours?
Andre Gide
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It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.
Andre Gide
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The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.
Andre Gide
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Sin is whatever obscures the soul.
Andre Gide
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The only real education comes from what goes counter to you.
Andre Gide
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I wished for nothing beyond her smile, and to walk with her thus, hand in hand, along a sun warmed, flower bordered path.
Andre Gide
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It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
Andre Gide
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They establish distinctions and reserves which I cannot apply to myself, for I exist only as a whole my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it.
Andre Gide
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It is the special quality of love not to be able to remain stationary, to be obliged to increase under pain of diminishing.
Andre Gide
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I advise the young to tell themselves constantly that most often it is up to them alone.
Andre Gide
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One should want only one thing and want it constantly. Then one is sure of getting it. But I desire everything, and consequently get nothing.
Andre Gide
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The most decisive actions of our life - I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future - are, more often than not, unconsidered.
Andre Gide
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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.
Andre Gide
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When everything belongs to everyone, nobody will take care of anything.
Andre Gide
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What seems different in yourself that's the rare thing you possess. The one thing that gives each of us his worth, and that's just what we try to suppress. And we claim to love life.
Andre Gide