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
True intelligence very readily conceives of an intelligence superior to its own; and this is why truly intelligent men are modest.
An unprejudiced mind is probably the rarest thing in the world; to nonprejudice I attach the greatest value.
What seems different in yourself; that's the rare thing you possess. The one thing that gives each of us his worth, and that's just what we try to suppress. And we claim to love life.
The itch is a mean, unconfessable, ridiculous malady; one can pity someone who is suffering ; someone who wants to scratch himself makes one laugh.
Man's first and greatest victory must be won against the gods.
Nothing blocks happiness like happiness remembered.
What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.
Every perfect action is accompanied by pleasure. By that you can tell what you ought to do.
Do not scorn little victories.
I find just as much profit in cultivating my hates as my loves.
With each book you write you should lose the admirers you gained with the previous one.
It seems to me that had I not known Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or Freud or X or Z, I should have thought just as I did, and that I found in them rather an authorization than an awakening. Above all, they taught me to cease doubting, to cease fearing my thoughts, and to let those thoughts lead me to those lands that were not uninhabitable because after all I found them already there .
Our judgements about things vary according to the time left us to live -that we think is left us to live.
Obsessions of the Orient, of the desert, of its ardor and its emptiness, of the shadows of palm gardens, of the garments white and wide - obsessions where the senses go berserk, where nerves are exasperated, and which made me, at the onset of each night, believe sleep impossible.