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
The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions.
No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.
It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself-and thus make yourself indispensable.
God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.
There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.
Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.
Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.
'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.
In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.
We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us
Please do not understand me too quickly.