I soon realized that what are supposedly the worst things (lying, to mention only one) are hard to do only… — André Gide
I soon realized that what are supposedly the worst things (lying, to mention only one) are hard to do only when you have never done them; but that each of them becomes, and so quickly! easy, pleasant, sweet in repetition, and soon a second nature.
p. 60Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Today beauty no longer acts, and action no longer bothers about being beautiful.
p. 111
If there’s one thing I detest it’s a man of principles. … You can’t expect any kind of sincerity from him, for he only does what his principles have ordered him to do, or else he considers what he does a transgression.
p. 105
As for the philosophers, whose role might have been to instruct me, I had long known what to expect of them; mathematicians or neo-Kantians, they kept as far as possible from troublesome reality, and were no more concerned with life than the algebrist with the existence of the quantities he is measuring.
p. 90
