André Gide
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André Paul Guillaume Gide (22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947.
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- Familles, je vous hais! foyers clos; portes refermées; possessions jalouses du bonheur.
- Translation: Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.
- Les Nourritures Terrestres (Fruits of the Earth), Bk. IV (1897)
- " Nathaniel, 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."
- Les Nourritures Terrestres (Fruits of the Earth)
- 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.
- Les Nourritures Terrestres (Fruits of the Earth), Envoi
- True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one’s own the suffering and joys of others.
- Portraits and Aphorisms, Pretexts (1903)
- Le péché, c'est ce qui obscurcit l'âme.
- Translation: Sin is whatever obscures the soul.
- La Symphonie Pastorale (1919)
- 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.
- Les Faux Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), Pt. 3, ch. 16 (1926)
- Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.
- Poétique
- C'est avec de beaux sentiments qu'on fait de la mauvaise littérature.
- Translation: It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.
- Letter to François Mauriac (1928)
- There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.
- If it Die Ch. III
- Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
[edit] Journals 1889-1949
- Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.
- Literature and Ethics, entry for 1901
- The abominable effort to take one’s sins with one to paradise.
- Detached Pages, entry for 1913
- 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.
- Detached Pages, entry for 1913
- 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.
- Entry for January 21, 1929
- The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.
- Entry for November 23, 1940
