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
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.
True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joys of others.
It is the special quality of love not to be able to remain stationary, to be obliged to increase under pain of diminishing....
The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say - because they were too obvious.
The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.
To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.
Welcome anything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.
Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon.
The truth is, I hoped the cure would dislike me. I tried to think of disagreeable things to say to him -- I could hit on nothing that wasn't charming. It's wonderful how hard I find it not to be fascinating.
Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.
Envying another man's happiness is madness; you wouldn't know what to do with it if you had it.
Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for so long as that?...And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?