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
Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, but lacks imagination and deep self-expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship.
By the time a philospher answers a question weve usually forgotten what was asked.
An artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.
If only we could lean over the soul we love and see as in a mirror the image we cast!
The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love.
Prejudices are the props of civilization.
Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes
Not everyone can be an orphan.
The abominable effort to take one’s sins with one to paradise.
Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessors of happiness
I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts.
To understand is nothing, but to be understood-that is the problem and the source of anguish. The soul throbs and would have the other know-but can not and feels isolated. Then come gestures, words, awkward explanations and material symbols for imponderable outbursts of feeling-and the soul despairs.
So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity.
There is no work of art that is without short cuts.