"I have always thought that great artists were those who dared to confer the right of beauty on things so natural that people say on seeing them, "Why did I never realize before that that was beautiful..."
- André Gide
"Do you know why our poetry today and especially our philosophy are such dead issues? Because they've cut themselves off from life. Now, Greece idealized on life's own level: an artist's life was alrea..."
"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
"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."
"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 re..."
"I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance."
"I do not want to recollect. I should be afraid of preventing the future and of allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour's fre..."
"What would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told."
"To tell the truth, my dear count, I must own that of all nauseating human emanations, literature is one of those which disgust me most. I can see nothing in it but compromise and flattery. And I go so..."
"Rather than recount his life as he has lived it, he must live his life as he will recount it."