Andre Gide Quotes

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

I am really puzzled to understand myself.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

I've always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.

I just want to live each moment, but it's kind of hard to do that when you are asked to analyze yourself constantly. But it's also good in that you are forced to think about things that you don't ordinarily think about. I think it's strange.

I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life.

Introspection! I hate it!

I am sure of nothing so little as my own intentions.

As a young man, I was very introverted and quiet, but with a lot of intensity and feelings.

Madame Bovary is myself.

I think I'm good at looking moody. I'm not much good at analysing myself, but I tend to fit the strange and tortured characters.

I feel like I'm in my own head a lot; it just feels amazing, but scary, weird and confusing.

I look in the mirror, and what I see is someone who has never grown up - a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths.

Everybody knows if you don't have an examined life, you go mad.

I used to say it was painful to write lyrics about myself and looking inward.

I've criticized myself over the years.

A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?

Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.

...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.

Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap.

There are instances when we are like horses, we psychologists, and grow restless: we see our own shadow wavering up and down before us. A psychologist must look away from himself in order to see anything at all.

Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.

I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis.