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
Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.
A desire for truth is by no means a need for certitude and it would be unwise to confuse one with the other.
Sadness is a state of sin.
The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers the most from its own limitations.
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.
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.
The finest virtues can become deformed with age. The precise mind becomes finicky; the thrifty man, miserly; the cautious man, timorous; the man of imagination, fanciful. Even perseverance ends up in a sort of stupidity. Just as, on the other hand, being too willing to understand too many opinions, too diverse ways of seeing, constancy is lost and the mind goes astray in a restless fickleness.
Understanding is the beginning of approving.
He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.
The thing I am most aware of is my limits. And this is natural; for I never, or almost never, occupy the middle of my cage; my whole being surges toward the bars.
Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys.
A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.
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.