Andre Gide Quotes

If you cannot be open-minded, then you do not possess your ideas, your ideas possess you.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a pet notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.

The fundamentalists have taken the fun out of the mental.

Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners.

When we are accustomed to use bad reasons for proving natural effects, we are not willing to receive good reasons when they are discovered

When I was younger, I could get that white-knuckle grip of holding on to an idea and not wanting to let it go.

She live in a mindset that I could never move to

When we have learned something, there's this thing called belief perseverance. Having learned something, we tend to cling to that belief, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

There is no man so blind as one who has made up his mind.

We are set in our ways, bound by our perspectives and stuck in our thinking.

A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.

They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.

Conservatism is less a set of ideas than it is a pathological distemper, a militant anger over the fact that the universe is not closed and life is not static.

Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference.

I don't know very much but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it…My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

Those who have most at stake in the old culture, or are most rigid in their beliefs, try to summon people back to the old ideas.'

The fact is that people would rather cling when they're afraid of something to a priori beliefs than rather open their minds about it.

The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.

All who have read a few old books have picked up the old tactics of considering every new idea a 'heresy' which must be rooted out.

having considerable mind, changing it became almost as ponderous an operation as moving a barn, although not nearly so stable.

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

Progress is slow partly from mere intellectual inertia. In a subject where there is no agreed procedure for knocking out errors, doctrines have a long life. A professor teaches what he was taught, and his pupils, with a proper respect and reverence for teachers, set up a resistance against his critics for no other reason than that it was he whose pupils they were.