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
Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for so long as that?...And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?
Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents only one of a thousand attitudes. You must find your own. If someone else could have done something as well as you, don’t do it. If someone else could have said something as well as you, don’t say it—or written something as well as you, don’t write it. Grow fond only of that which you can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or patiently, ah! that most irreplaceable of beings.
At times is it seems that I am living my life backward, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles. Wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.
I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance.
Wisdom comes not from reason but from love.
I can't expect others to share my virtues. It's good enough for me if they share my vices.
I have no use for knowledge that has not been preceded by a sensation
In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.
Long only for what you have.
In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.
Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.
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.
'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.