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
Humanity cherishes its swaddling clothes; but it shall not grow up unless it can free itself from them. Turning down his mother's breast does not make the weaned child ungrateful. ... Rise up naked, valiant; make the sheaths crack; push aside the stakes; to grow straight you need no more than the thrust of your sap and the call of the sun.
What eludes logic is the most precious element in us, and one can draw nothing from a syllogism that the mind has not put there in advance.
Enduring fame is promised only to those writers who can offer to successive generations a substance constantly renewed; for every generation arrives upon the scene with its own particular hunger.
The anxiety we have for the figure we cut, for our personage, is constantly cropping out. We are showing off and are often more concerned with making a display than with living. Whoever feels observed observes himself.
Each of us really understands in others only those feelings he is capable of producing himself.
Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! And without too many regrets, if possible! Those from which the sap has withdrawn. But, good Lord, what beautiful colors!
We call "happiness" a certain set of circumstances that makes joy possible. But we call joy that state of mind and emotions that needs nothing to feel happy.
Do not think your truth can be found by anyone else.
When you have nothing to say, or to hide, there is no need to be prudent.
It is not becoming to lay to virtue the weariness of old age.
The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes.
In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring...
I would like the events never to be told directly by the author, but rather to be introduced (and several times, from various angles) by those among the characters on whom they will have had any effect. I would like those events, in the account they will make of them, to appear slightly distorted; a kind of interest stems, for the reader, from the simple fact that he should need to restore. The story requires his collaboration in order to properly take shape.
Man: The most complex of beings, and thus the most dependent of beings. On all that made you up, you depend.