André Gide

People cannot discover new lands until they have the courage to lose sight of the shore.

It is better to fail at your own life than to succeed at someone else’s.

We all have a social mask, right? We put it on, we go out, put our best foot forward, our best image. But behind that social mask is a personal truth, what we really, really believe about who we are and what we’re capable of.

Roaming through the jungle of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’, searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.

Everyone makes mistakes. The wise are not people who never make mistakes, but those who forgive themselves and learn from their mistakes.

There are certain things we come into this world having to defeat.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

Romanticism implies nostalgia for damaged goods.

Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspision that he is trying to be funny.

You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.

Now payback is a bad bitch and baby, I’m the baddest.

The art of living… is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.

We lift ourselves by our thoughts. We climb upon our vision of ourselves.

Without doubt, Thomas Edison is my greatest contemporary.

I want to be a hero, a small and good kind of hero, even though I know heroes have very short lives.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

I’m beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.