Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

The English form that circulates (“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore”, often with “Columbus” or “Christopher Columbus” as the credited author, or with Gide named as the source) is a looser and more flowery rendering of Édouard’s sentence: Gide wrote “terre nouvelle” (a new land), not oceans, “consentir à” (consenting to) rather than courage, and “d’abord et longtemps” (at first and for a long time), which the usual form drops. The words about Columbus in the novel are Bernard’s, just before: “Quand Colomb découvrit l’Amérique, savait-il vers quoi il voguait ?” (the discoverer who had no goal); Édouard answers with the sentence about new lands. Searched: the text of the 1925 NRF edition of Les Faux-monnayeurs (archive.org) for “rivage”, “terre nouvelle” and “perdre de vue”; Wikiquote (en) for Gide, which lists the sentence under Les Faux-monnayeurs and notes the Columbus misattribution and the “oceans” misquotation. No dated early English form (or Columbus credit) was traced, so there is no trail here.

Édouard, the novelist in the book who is writing a novel called Les Faux-monnayeurs, is talking with the young Bernard, who has run away from his father’s home. Bernard asks whether you need to look at a goal to steer through life, and says that Columbus, when he discovered America, did not know where he was going: his goal was to go straight ahead, and his goal was himself. Édouard breaks in with what he has often thought about art.

In art, and above all in writing, only those who set out for the unknown count, and they must first accept long periods with no shore in sight; writers who hug the coast find nothing new.

Credited to Christopher Columbus, or to Gide as a general statement about courage in life. In the book it is Édouard’s remark about literature, in answer to Bernard’s mention of Columbus, and Édouard is a character, not Gide speaking in his own name.

• ShortenedMan cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. The wording Wikiquote gives as the common misquotation of Gide’s sentence (“oceans” for “terre nouvelle”, “courage” for “consentir”). Where it was seen

Change, Courage, Wisdom, Art

• The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. (misattributed) Friedrich Nietzsche
• Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. C. S. Lewis
• To be great, be whole. Fernando Pessoa
• The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skilful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests. (misattributed) Epictetus
• Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. (misattributed) Mark Twain

• archive.org/details/lesfauxmonnayeur00gide_0 (Les Faux-monnayeurs, NRF, 1925)
• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/André_Gide (Les Faux-monnayeurs; notes the Columbus misattribution and the “oceans” misquotation)

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Attributed to André Gide. Not in these words. The idea is in The Counterfeiters (1925), Troisième partie, chapter XIV (Édouard talking to Bernard), Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925), p. 147 of the NRF edition read. Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/one-does-not-discover-new-lands-without-losing-sight-of-the-shore/ (checked 24 October 2026).

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