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
An unprejudiced mind is probably the rarest thing in the world; to nonprejudice I attach the greatest value.
"Let the dead bury the dead." There is not a single word of Christ to which the Christian religion has paid less attention.
We call "happiness" a certain set of circumstances that makes joy possible. But we call joy that state of mind and emotions that needs nothing to feel happy.
The only really Christian art is that which, like St. Francis, does not fear being wedded to poverty. This rises far above art-as-ornament.
Our judgements about things vary according to the time left us to live -that we think is left us to live.
Mozart's joy is made of serenity, and a phrase of his music is like a calm thought; his simplicity is merely purity. It is a crystalline thing in which all the emotions play a role, but as if already celestially transposed. Moderation consists in feeling emotions as the angels do.
If the flower were not attached to its stem, it would flee at the approach of man, like the insect or the bird; for the attribute of man on the earth, at least as long as he does not better understand his role, is to worry and frighten what he is not interested in taming for utilitarian purposes. Man is skillful in mistreating everything he can use
The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes.
In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring...
I would like the events never to be told directly by the author, but rather to be introduced (and several times, from various angles) by those among the characters on whom they will have had any effect. I would like those events, in the account they will make of them, to appear slightly distorted; a kind of interest stems, for the reader, from the simple fact that he should need to restore. The story requires his collaboration in order to properly take shape.
Drunkenness is never anything but a substitute for happiness.
The great artist is one whom constraint exalts, for whom the obstacle is a springboard.
It seems to me that had I not known Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or Freud or X or Z, I should have thought just as I did, and that I found in them rather an authorization than an awakening. Above all, they taught me to cease doubting, to cease fearing my thoughts, and to let those thoughts lead me to those lands that were not uninhabitable because after all I found them already there .
Clear and precise ideas are the most dangerous, for one does not dare to change them.