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
Laws and rules of conduct are for the state of childhood; education is an emancipation.
How do you know that the fruit is ripe? Simply because it leaves the branch.
I advise the young to tell themselves constantly that most often it is up to them alone.
There are admirable potentialities in every human being.
The young people who come to me in the hope of hearing me utter a few memorable maxims are quite disappointed. Aphorisms are not my forte, I say nothing but banalities.... I listen to them and they go away delighted.
True eloquence forgoes eloquence.
The true return to nature is the definitive return to the elements-death.
From the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair.
There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection.
We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.
Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death
If the flower were not attached to its stem, it would flee at the approach of man, like the insect or the bird; for the attribute of man on the earth, at least as long as he does not better understand his role, is to worry and frighten what he is not interested in taming for utilitarian purposes. Man is skillful in mistreating everything he can use
Too chaste a youth leads to a dissolute old age.
Each thought becomes an anxiety in my brain. I am becoming the ugliest of all things: a busy man.