Andre Gide Quotes

Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

I just go out and try to make sense of the world around me.

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

What a man sees depends on what he looks at and what his previous experience has taught him to see.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.

I saw more than I can tell / And I understood more than I saw.

Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.

Everything I wrote was true because I believed what I saw.

You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.

We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

The question is not what you look at – but how you look & whether you see.

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.

We always try to interpret things in accordance with what we want and not as they are.

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

They did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.

You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.

We had the experience, but we missed the meaning.

What you look at hard seems to look at you.

The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.

Experience teaches us not to assume that the obvious is clearly understood