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 capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.
Every instant of our lives is essentially irreplaceable: you must know this in order to concentrate on life.
I prefer granting with a good grace what I know I shan't be able to prevent.
They establish distinctions and reserves which I cannot apply to myself, for I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it.
A man thinks he owns things, and it is he who is owned
The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death's reach.
The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.
If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one's youth, one's greatest indignation would be for what one has become.
Don't think that your truth could be found by someone else.
To be sure, theory is useful. But without warmth of heart and without love it bruises the very ones it claims to save.
Solitude is bearable only with God.
He who makes great demands upon himself is naturally inclined to make great demands on others.
How much more sensuality invites to art than does sentimentality.
The very act of sacrifice magnifies the one who sacrifices himself to the point where his sacrifice is much more costly to humanity than would have been the loss of those for whom he is sacrificing himself. But in his abnegation lies the secret of his grandeur.