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
Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessors of happiness
Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessors of happiness
I find just as much profit in cultivating my hates as my loves.
Yet I'm sure there's something more to be read in a man. People dare not -- they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry -- I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don't find themselves at all. I hate this moral agoraphobia -- it's the worst kind of cowardice. You can't create something without being alone. But who's trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that's just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life.
One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time
The belief that becomes truth for me - is that which allows me the best use of my strength, the best means of putting my virtues into action
Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.
The miser puts his gold pieces into a coffer; but as soon as the coffer is closed, it is as if it were empty.
The most decisive actions of our life - I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future - are, more often than not, unconsidered.
You have to let other people be right' was his answer to their insults. 'It consoles them for not being anything else.
The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness?
I do not love men: I love what devours them.
The individual person is more interesting than people in general; he and not they is the one whom God created in His image.
The individual man tries to escape the race. And as soon as he ceases to represent the race, he represents man.