Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Andre Gide (French Novelist)

André Gide (1869–1951,) fully André Paul Guillaume Gide, was a French novelist, writer, and diarist. This winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature is generally regarded as one of France’s most celebrated 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. It 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.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Andre Gide

Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Authors & Writing

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.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Peace

Fish die belly-upward and rise to the surface; it is their way of falling.
—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
Topics: The Present

There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Fear, Anxiety

Not everyone can be an orphan.
—Andre Gide

Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.
—Andre Gide

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him, and travel in his company.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Reading

The abominable effort to take one’s sins with one to paradise.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Paradise

Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Hedonism, Emotions, Self-Pity

The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Logic

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
Topics: Time Management, Value of Time, The Present, Happiness

The individual never asserts himself more than when he forgets himself.
—Andre Gide

What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself—and thus make yourself indispensable.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Being True to Yourself

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
Topics: Self-Discovery

I believe that … all that can, be will be, if man helps.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Optimism, Health, Positive Attitudes

One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Courage, Discovery, Uncertainty, Doubt, Action, Exploration, Risk

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Doubt

Too chaste a youth leads to a dissolute old age
—Andre Gide
Topics: Youth

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

Before I explain my book to others, I expect them to explain it to me. To claim to explain it first is to immediately narrow down its reach; for if we know what we intended to say, we do not know whether we said only that. – One always says more than THAT. – And what interests me most is what I put in without knowing, – that unconscious share, which I would like to call God’s share.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Authors & Writing

What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Writing

A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Aspirations, Goals, Focus, Concentration

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
Topics: Intuition

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Prayer

Whoever starts out toward the unknown must consent to venture alone.
—Andre Gide

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Adversity

Obsessions of the Orient, of the desert, of its ardor and its emptiness, of the shadows of palm gardens, of the garments white and wide – obsessions where the senses go berserk, where nerves are exasperated, and which made me, at the onset of each night, believe sleep impossible.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Imagination

Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Change

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: Future, Truth, Confidence, Potential, Strength

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