André Gide (1869–1951,) the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947, is generally regarded as one of France’s greatest novelists.
Born to a middle-class Protestant family in Paris, Gide published his first novel, The Notebooks of André Walter (1891,) at age 22. In 1893 and 1894, Gide journeyed to Northern Africa where he became very ill and narrowly escaped death. This decisive event led him to question his puritanical upbringing and formed the basis for a pair of his renowned psychological novels, The Immoralist (1902), about pleasure seeking and yearning for new experiences, and Strait is the Gate (1909), about the complexities of adolescence, love, asceticism, and sacrifice.
Gide published several semi-autobiographical narratives, essays, and memoirs. His works are characterized by the tensions in his life, viz., conflict and compromise between a sense of social moralities and individuality and the need for acceptance despite his controversial personal life and beliefs. In another famous novel, The Counterfeiters (1926,) Gide exposed the hypocrisy of insincere people. He also served as a literary critic and translated William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Joseph Conrad, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
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Let every emotion be capable becoming an intoxication to you. If what you eat fails to make you drunk, it is because you are not hungry enough.
—Andre Gide
There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.
—Andre Gide
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.
—Andre Gide
Whoever starts out toward the unknown must consent to venture alone.
—Andre Gide
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
—Andre Gide
In order to judge properly, one must get away somewhat from what one is judging, after having loved it. This is true of countries, of persons, and of oneself.
—Andre Gide
Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
—Andre Gide
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.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Prayer
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.
—Andre Gide
Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.
—Andre Gide
There are admirable potentialities in every human being. Believe in your strength and your youth. Learn to repeat endlessly to yourself, ‘It all depends on me’.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Truth, Future, Strength, Potential, Confidence
Fish die belly-upward and rise to the surface; it is their way of falling
—Andre Gide
The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.
—Andre Gide
True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one’s own the suffering and joys of others.
—Andre Gide
The most decisive actions of our life… are most often unconsidered actions.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Intuition
Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.
—Andre Gide
The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Talent
The belief that becomes truth to me is that which allows me the best use of my strength, the best means of putting my virtues into action.
—Andre Gide
It is better to be hated for what you are
than to be loved for something you are not.
—Andre Gide
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
—Andre Gide
Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow’s joy is possible only if today’s makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.
—Andre Gide
The individual never asserts himself more than when he forgets himself.
—Andre Gide
Sin is whatever obscures the soul.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Sin
It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves–in finding themselves.
—Andre Gide
It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking at it that one overcomes it; but, rather, often by working on the one next to it. Certain people and certain things require to be approached at an angle.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Perseverance, Ideas
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