Whoever studies himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.
The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say—because they were too obvious.
Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death.
Dare to be yourself.
Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
It is good to follow one’s own bent, so long as it leads upward.
In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.
At times it seems that I am living my life backward, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin.
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
The color of truth is grey.
Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.
The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers most from its own limitations.
Only fools don’t contradict themselves.
Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you.
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.
Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
He who makes great demands upon himself is naturally inclined to make great demands upon others.
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. It’s their way of falling.
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.
My soul was born covered with wrinkles—wrinkles that my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.
Seize from every moment its unique novelty and do not prepare your joys.
Understanding is the beginning of approving.
Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.
Welcome anything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.
The scholar seeks, the artist finds.
Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves!
We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.
A work of art is an exaggeration.
Our judgments about things vary according to the time left us to live—that we think is left us to live.
To win one’s joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.
One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.
What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.
The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.
So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity.
To what a degree the same past can leave different marks—and especially admit of different interpretations.
IMAGE GALLERY
André Gide, 1893
Oscar Wilde, 1882
Billy Rose Theater Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Image of the Marquis of Queensberry’s visiting card, left for Oscar Wilde at the Albermarle Club, London, in 1895, and which precipitated Wilde’s lawsuit against him for criminal libel. Note it is marked as “Exhibit A” in the trial.
OSCAR WILDE QUOTES
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Genius is born—not paid.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.
A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
Biography lends to death a new terror.
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I am not young enough to know everything.
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.
It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Wisdom comes with winters.
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead.
My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s.
I can resist anything but temptation.
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Only the shallow know themselves.
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
THE PRESENT TRANSLATION INTRODUCES A WORK OF Gide which dates from the first years of the century. The first of the two essays was written in 1901; the second, in 1905. They were published together in 1910 by Mercure de France.
The essays require no introductory comment. However, the following two quotations from the Journal supplement the text and provide interesting perspectives. The first is dated January 1st, 1892, when Gide was twenty-two years old; the second, June 29th, 1913:
“Wilde has done me, I think, nothing but harm. With him, I had forgotten how to think. I had more varied emotions, but I could no longer order them; I was particularly unable to follow the deductions of others. A few thoughts, occasionally; but my clumsiness in handling them made me abandon them. I am now resuming, with difficulty, though with great delight, my history of philosophy, where I am studying the problem of language (which I shall resume with Muller and Renan).”
“Certainly, in my little book on Wilde, I appeared rather unfair toward his work and I pooh-poohed it too casually, I mean before having known it well enough. I admire, as I think back upon it, the good grace with which Wilde listened to me when, in Algiers, I passed judgment upon his plays (quite impertinently, as it seems to me now). No impatience in the tone of his reply, and not even a protest; it was then that he was led to say to me, “I have put all my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works.” I should be curious to know whether he ever uttered this remark to anyone else.
I do hope later on to be able to come back to the matter and tell everything which I dared not say at first.
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