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
Too chaste an adolescence makes for a dissolute old age. It is doubtless easier to give up something one has known than something one imagines.
The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea.
The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.
He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.
The thing I am most aware of is my limits. And this is natural; for I never, or almost never, occupy the middle of my cage; my whole being surges toward the bars.
Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.
The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.
One should want only one thing and want it constantly. Then one is sure of getting it. But I desire everything, and consequently get nothing.
But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.
Understanding is the beginning of approving.
Sin is whatever obscures the soul.
Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.
What thwarts us and demands of us the greatest effort is also what can teach us most.
Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents only one of a thousand attitudes. You must find your own. If someone else could have done something as well as you, don’t do it. If someone else could have said something as well as you, don’t say it—or written something as well as you, don’t write it. Grow fond only of that which you can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or patiently, ah! that most irreplaceable of beings.