Andre Gide Quotes

• 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

• There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.

  Andre Gide

• There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.

  Andre Gide

• The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.

  Andre Gide

• The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

  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

• The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.

  Andre Gide

• The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

  Andre Gide

• The color of truth is gray.

  Andre Gide

• Sin is whatever obscures the soul.

  Andre Gide

• Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by logic.

  Andre Gide

  Topics in Beauty

  Tags in Inspired, Madness

• 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

• Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

  Andre Gide

• Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.

  Andre Gide

• Not everyone can be an orphan.

  Andre Gide

• 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.

  Andre Gide

• Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.

  Andre Gide

• 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.

  Andre Gide

• 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.

  Andre Gide

• It is good to follow one’s own bent, so long as it leads upward.

  Andre Gide

Andre Gide (66)

Birth:	22nd November, 1869
Death:	19th February, 1951
Nationality:	French
Profession:	Essayist, Novelist, Writer

About

André Paul Guillaume Gide was born in Paris. He was 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. Gide was brought up in isolated conditions in Normandy and became a prolific writer at an early age, publishing his first novel, The Notebooks of Andre Walter, in 1891, at the age of twenty-one. 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.

Related Authors

• Steve Almond
• Cynthia Ozick
• Charles W. Chesnutt
• Thomas Mann
• Jonathan Franzen
• August Strindberg
• Judith Moore
• Zadie Smith
• Ernest Hello
• Walter Benjamin

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 25th December

Births

• 1971 - Dido Armstrong
• 1959 - Michael P. Anderson
• 1876 - Muhammad Ali Jinnah
• 1888 - Sonya Levien
• 1958 - Rickey Henderson

Deaths

• 1995 - Dean Martin
• 1937 - Newton Diehl Baker
• 1676 - Sir Matthew Hale
• 1968 - Upton Sinclair
• 1946 - W. C. Fields