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
True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joys of others.
There is a law in life: When one door closes to us another one opens.
I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts.
We no longer admit any other truth than that which is expedient; for there is no worse error than the truth that may weaken the arm that is fighting.
Great minds tend toward banality. It is the noblest effort of individualism. But it implies a sort of modesty, which is so rare that it is scarcely found except in the greatest, or in beggars.
To win ones joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.
An experience teaches only the good observer; but far from seeking a lesson in it, everyone looks for an argument in experience, and everyone interprets the conclusion in his own way.
Through fear of resembling one another, through horror of having to submit, through uncertainty as well, through skepticism and complexity, there is a multitude of individual little beliefs for the triumph of strange little individuals.
It is the special quality of love not to be able to remain stationary, to be obliged to increase under pain of diminishing....
The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.
The scholar seeks truth, the artist finds.
A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly
It is better to fail at your own life than to succeed at someone else's.
To understand is nothing, but to be understood-that is the problem and the source of anguish. The soul throbs and would have the other know-but can not and feels isolated. Then come gestures, words, awkward explanations and material symbols for imponderable outbursts of feeling-and the soul despairs.