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Date of Birth
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22-November-1869
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Place of Birth
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Paris
(ÃŽle-de-France, France, Seine)
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Nationality
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France
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Also know as
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Andre Gide
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Profession
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Essayist, Writer, Novelist, Author
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Quotes
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- There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.
- A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.
- Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.
- The abominable effort to take one's sins with one to paradise.
- It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.
- Are you then unable to recognize unless it has the same sound as yours?
- Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.
- Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
- Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.
- Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. Its their way of falling.
- Sin is whatever obscures the soul.
- It is good to follow one's own bent, so long as it leads upward.
- Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.
- 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.
- 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.
- It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
- 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.
- Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
- The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.
- The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.
- Believe those who are seeking truth, doubt those who find it.
- The most decisive actions of our life -- I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future -- are, more often than not, unconsidered.
- It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.
- Not everyone can be an orphan.
- Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
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André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.
Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation between the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straitlaced education and a narrow social moralism. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, even to the point of owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. His political activity is informed by the same ethos, as suggested by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR.
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