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André Gide Quotes
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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.

Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straitlaced traducing of 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 centres on 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 indicated by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR.

✵ 22. November 1869 – 19. February 1951   •   Other names André Paul Guillaume Gide
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André Gide: 74   quotes 18   likes

André Gide Quotes

“The finest virtues can become deformed with age. The precise mind becomes finicky; the thrifty man, miserly; the cautious man, timorous; the man of imagination, fanciful. Even perseverance ends up in a sort of stupidity. Just as, on the other hand, being too willing to understand too many opinions, too diverse ways of seeing, constancy is lost and the mind goes astray in a restless fickleness.”

André Gide

“An Unprejudiced Mind,” p. 324
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

Age , Stupidity , Way , Imagination

“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.”

André Gide

Detached Pages, entry for 1913
Journals 1889-1949

“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.”

André Gide

Entry for January 21, 1929
Journals 1889-1949

Love , Beauty

“Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.”

André Gide

Ainsi soit-il; ou, Les Jeux sont faits
So be it; or, The chips are down
Gallimard
1952
174
Original: (fr) Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent; doutez de tout, mais ne doutez pas de vous-même.

Truth