Quotes by Andre Gide

About Andre Gide:

André Paul Guillaume Gide 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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Sin is whatever obscures the soul.

Andre Gide

The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.

Andre Gide

Do you know the reason why poetry and philosophy are nothing but dead-letter nowadays? It is because they have severed themselves from life. In Greece, ideas went hand-in-hand with life; so that the artist's life was already a poetic realisation, the...

Andre Gide

I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance.

Andre Gide

Fear of ridicule begets the worst cowardice.

Andre Gide

He (Lafcadio) was sitting all alone in a compartment of the train which was carrying him away from Rome, & contemplating–not without satisfaction–his hands in their grey doeskin gloves, as they lay on the rich fawn-colored plaid, which, in spite ...

Andre Gide

I do not want to recollect. I should be afraid of preventing the future and of allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour's freshness. It is never enough for me to have been hap...

Andre Gide

Le présent serait plein de tous les avenirs, si le passé n'y projetait déjà une histoire.

Andre Gide

Mieux vaut être haï pour ce que l'on est, qu'aimé pour ce que l'on n'est pas.

Andre Gide

She already loved me too much to see me as I was.

Andre Gide

I wished for nothing beyond her smile, and to walk with her thus, hand in hand, along a sun warmed, flower bordered path.

Andre Gide

Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.

Andre Gide

Bisogna lasciare la ragione agli altri perché questo li consola di non aver altro.

Andre Gide

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

Andre Gide

In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring...

Andre Gide

Les choses les plus belles sont celles que souffle la folie et qu'écrit la raison. Il faut demeurer entre les deux, tout près de la folie quand on rêve, tout prêt de la raison quand on écrit.

Andre Gide

He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.

Andre Gide

The secret seemed to me much more mysterious than that; it was the secret, I thought, of one who had known death; for I moved a stranger among ordinary people, like a man who has risen from the grave, and at first I merely felt rather painfully out o...

Andre Gide

The color of truth is grey.

Andre Gide

Because it was natural, could he not see that it was marvelous? Poor creature!

Andre Gide

I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live - contented th...

Andre Gide

Author Bio

  • NameAndre Gide
  • DescriptionFrench novelist and essayist
  • AliasesAndré Paul Guillaume Gide
  • BornNovember 22, 1869
  • DiedFebruary 19, 1951
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionJournalist; Film Producer; Essayist; Playwright; Novelist; Diarist; Travel Writer; Translator; Autobiographer; Writer
  • WorksThe Immoralist; Strait Is The Gate; La Symphonie Pastorale; The Counterfeiters
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature