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
It is the special quality of love not to be able to remain stationary, to be obliged to increase under pain of diminishing....
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.
I wished for nothing beyond her smile, and to walk with her thus, hand in hand, along a sun warmed, flower bordered path.
What seems different in yourself; that's the rare thing you possess. The one thing that gives each of us his worth, and that's just what we try to suppress. And we claim to love life.
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
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.
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.
The funny thing about love is that it must continually grow or it will diminish.
One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time
Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessors of happiness
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.