- “Let the importance lie in your look, not in the things you look at.”
- “I devoted three years of travel to forgetting all that I had learned with my head. This unlearning was slow and difficult; it was of more use to me than all the learning imposed by men, and was really the beginning of an education.”
- “All our life long we have been tormented by the uncertainty of our paths. How can I put it? All choice, when one comes to think of it, is terrifying: liberty when there is no duty to guide it, terrifying.”
- “All your gathered knowledge of what is outside you will remain outside you to all eternity. Why do you attach so much importance to it?”
- “Act without judging whether the action is right or wrong. Love without caring whether what you love is good or bad.”
- “Let me have no rest but the sleep of death. I am afraid that every desire, every energy I have not satisfied during my life may survive to torment me.”
- “Melancholy is nothing but abated fervor.”
- “Every creature is capable of nakedness; every emotion, of plentitude.”
- “Every feeling is present.”
- “Our acts are attached to us as its glimmer is to phosphorous. They consume us, it is true, but they make our splendor.”
- “I was absorbed in it to self-extinction.”
- “There are strange possibilities in every man. The present would be pregnant with all futures if the past had not already projected its history into it. But, alas, a one and only past can offer us no more than a one and only future – which it casts before us like an infinite bridge over space.”
- “And my brain felt like those stormy skies, charged with lowering clouds, on days when to breathe is almost impossible, and all nature longs for the flash of a lightning that will rip open the murky, humor-laden bladders that blot out heaven’s azure.”
- “How long, O waiting, will you last?”
- “I was perpetually too tired to speak, to listen, to write…”
- “My whole being felt, as it were, an immense need to refresh its vigor in a bath of newness.”
- “Let your waiting be not even a longing, but simply welcoming. Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else. Long only for what you have.”
- “Let your longing be for love, and your passions a lover’s”
- “I have always carried with me all my possessions. At every smallest moment of my life I have felt within me the whole of my wealth. It consisted, not in the addition of a great many particular items, but in my single adoration of them.”
- “Look upon the evening as the death of the day; and upon the morning as the birth of all things. Let every moment renew your vision.”
- “The wise man is he who constantly wonders afresh.”
- “Understand that the only possession of any value is life. The smallest moment in life is stronger than death and cancels it, Death is no more than permission granted to other modes of life to exist, so that everything can may be ceaselessly renewed – so that no mode of life may last longer than the time needed for it to express itself.”
- “It is not enough for me to read that the sand on the seashore is soft; my bare feet must feel it. I have no use for knowledge that has not been preceded by a sensation.”
- “I have seen springtime unfold.”
- “Every moment of my life brought me its freshness as an ineffable gift, so that I lived in an almost perpetual state of passionate wonder. I became intoxicated with extreme rapidity and went about in a sort of daze.”
- “Let every emotion be capable of becoming intoxication to you.”
- “Never long to taste the waters of the past. Never seek to find again the past in the future.”
- “Why have you not understood that happiness is a chance encounter and at every moment presents itself to you like a beggar by the roadside?”
- “Your dream of tomorrow is a delight, but the delight of tomorrow is another.”
- “Everything comes at its own hour.”
- “The only wisdom I want to tech you is life. For thinking is a heavy burden.”
- “Take from each thing nothing but what it teaches you.”
- “Don’t you understand that each moment would not take on such incomparable vividness if it were not detached, so to speak, on the dark background of death.”
- “I should make no further attempt to do anything at all if I were told, if it were proved to me, that I had unlimited time to do it in.”
- “O earth, so excessively old and so young, if you knew, if you only knew the bitter-sweet taste, the delicious taste of man’s brief life!”
- “Man has only a single spring in his life, and the memory of a past joy is not the herald of coming happiness.”
- “Shall I wait for sleep that will not come?”
- “My love dives into the waves, forever passing, forever the same.”
- “my torpor seemed to come from the very complexity of my thought and the indecision of my will. I should have liked to sleep to all eternity in the moisture of the earth… Sometimes I said to myself that sensual pleasure would put an end to my trouble, and I tried to liberate my mind by exhausting my flesh.”
- “The flight of time maddened me. The necessity of choice was always intolerable; choosing seemed to me not so much selecting as rejecting what I didn’t select. I realized with horror how restricted were the passing hours and that time has only one dimension – a line – whereas I wanted it deep and wide; as my desires hurried impatiently along it.”
- “an unoccupied heart sick of its own emptiness”
- “Happy, thought I, the man who is attached to nothing on earth and who carries his fervor unremittingly with him through all the ceaseless mobility of life.”
- “I lived in the perpetual, delicious expectation of the future, no matter what it might be.”
- “My soul was the inn standing open at crossroads; entered whatever would. I made myself docile, conciliatory, at the disposal of each one of my senses, attentive, a listener without a single thought of himself, a captor of every passing emotion, and so little capable of reaction that, rather than protest against anything, I preferred to think ill of nothing. Indeed, I soon noticed how little my love of beauty was based upon hatred of ugliness.”
- “My heart, which was naturally loving – liquid, as it were – overflowed in all directions, no joy seemed to be exclusively my own. I invited any casual passer-by to share it…”
- “Do you think that at this precise moment you can feel to the uttermost the sensation of life in all its power, completeness, and immediacy, unless you forget all that is not life? The habits of your mind hamper you; you live in the past and the future, and you perceive nothing spontaneously. We only exist in the here and now; in the momentariness the whole past perishes before any of the future is born. Moments! You must realize the power of their presence. For each moment of our lives is essentially irreplaceable; you should learn to sink yourself in it utterly.”
- “Sight – most heart-breaking of our senses… Our heart breaks at the sight of what we cannot touch; The mind can seize a thought more easily than the hand what your eyes covet.”
Printed from: http://mindforums.com/quotations-2/andre-gide/ .
© 2010.
