Andre Gide
Andre Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gidewas a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 "for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight". Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionAutobiographer
Date of Birth22 November 1869
CountryFrance
The only really Christian art is that which, like St. Francis, does not fear being wedded to poverty. This rises far above art-as-ornament.
Atheism. There is not a single exalting and emancipating influence that does not in turn become inhibitory.
It is one of life's laws that as soon as one door closes another opens. But the tragedy is we look at the closed door and disregard the open one.
There's a law in life: whenever a door closes, a new one will open.
Chastity more rarely follows fear, or a resolution, or a vow, than it is the mere effect of lack of appetite and, sometimes even, of distaste.
Other people's appetites easily appear excessive when one doesn't share them.
I believe that in every circumstance I have been able to see rather clearly the most advantageous course I could follow, which is very rarely the one I did follow.
The difficulty comes from this, that Christianity (Christian orthodoxy) is exclusive and that belief in its truth excludes belief in any other truth. It does not absorb; it repulses.
It is essential to persuade the soldier that those he is being urged to massacre are bandits who do not deserve to live; before killing other good, decent fellows like himself, his gun would fall from his hands.
It is often so: the harder it is to hear, the more a truth is worth saying.
Woe to these people who have no appetite for the very dish that their age serves up.
Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling place always finds an inhabitant.
Whither should we aim if not towards God?
One is always wrong to open a conversation with the devil, for, however he goes about it, he always insists upon having the last word.