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
To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.
Welcome anything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.
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.
The truth is, I hoped the cure would dislike me. I tried to think of disagreeable things to say to him -- I could hit on nothing that wasn't charming. It's wonderful how hard I find it not to be fascinating.
Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.
I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.
Envying another man's happiness is madness; you wouldn't know what to do with it if you had it.
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?
No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.
It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself-and thus make yourself indispensable.
God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.
Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.
Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.