Andre Gide Men Quotations

The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness?

I do not love men: I love what devours them.

The individual man tries to escape the race. And as soon as he ceases to represent the race, he represents man.

Generally among intelligent people are found nothing but paralytics and among men of action nothing but fools.

It is only through restraint that man can manage not to suppress himself.

The wise man is he who constantly wonders afresh.

Man is extraordinarily clever in preventing himself from being happy; it would seem that the less able he is to endure misfortune the more apt he is to attach himself to it.

Without mysticism man can achieve nothing great.

Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.

Man! The most complex of creatures, and for this reason the most dependant of creatures. On everything that has formed you, you may depend. Do not balk at this apparent slavery....a debtor to many, you pay for your advantages by the same number of dependencies. Understand that independence is a form of poverty; that many things claim you, that many also claim kinship with you.

Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes

So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity.

Envying another man's happiness is madness; you wouldn't know what to do with it if you had it.

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

A man thinks he owns things, and it is he who is owned

The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.

The true return to nature is the definitive return to the elements-death.

Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death

If the flower were not attached to its stem, it would flee at the approach of man, like the insect or the bird; for the attribute of man on the earth, at least as long as he does not better understand his role, is to worry and frighten what he is not interested in taming for utilitarian purposes. Man is skillful in mistreating everything he can use

Each thought becomes an anxiety in my brain. I am becoming the ugliest of all things: a busy man.

True intelligence very readily conceives of an intelligence superior to its own; and this is why truly intelligent men are modest.

Man's first and greatest victory must be won against the gods.

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

Our judgements about things vary according to the time left us to live -that we think is left us to live.

What eludes logic is the most precious element in us, and one can draw nothing from a syllogism that the mind has not put there in advance.

Man: The most complex of beings, and thus the most dependent of beings. On all that made you up, you depend.

Man's responsibility increases as that of the gods decreases.

Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.

Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.

The wise man is astonished by anything.

Yet I'm sure there's something more to be read in a man. People dare not -- they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry -- I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don't find themselves at all. I hate this moral agoraphobia -- it's the worst kind of cowardice. You can't create something without being alone. But who's trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that's just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life.

The finest virtues can become deformed with age. The precise mind becomes finicky; the thrifty man, miserly; the cautious man, timorous; the man of imagination, fanciful. Even perseverance ends up in a sort of stupidity. Just as, on the other hand, being too willing to understand too many opinions, too diverse ways of seeing, constancy is lost and the mind goes astray in a restless fickleness.