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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

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Andre Gide
Age: 82 †
Born: 1869
Born: November 22
Died: 1951
Died: December 19
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Film Producer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Prosaist
Translator
Travel Writer
Writer
Paris
France
André Paul Guillaume Gide
Andre Gide
Andre Paul Guillaume Gide
Life
Ugly
Maxim
Development
Pernicious
Study
Maxims
Knowledge
Thyself
Success
Seeks
Caterpillar
Become
Studies
Caterpillars
Never
Butterfly
Arrest
Would
Whoever
Uprising

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The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions.
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The bad novelist constructs his characters he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act he hears their voices even before he knows them.
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Great minds tend toward banality. It is the noblest effort of individualism. But it implies a sort of modesty, which is so rare that it is scarcely found except in the greatest, or in beggars.
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If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.
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One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.
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True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joys of others.
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Man is extraordinarily clever in preventing himself from being happy it would seem that the less able he is to endure misfortune the more apt he is to attach himself to it.
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It is often so: the harder it is to hear, the more a truth is worth saying.
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Faith can move mountains true: mountains of stupidity.
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Most often it happens that one attributes to others only the feelings of which one is capable oneself.
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The pettiness of a mind can be measured by the pettiness of its adoration or its blasphemy.
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It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.
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Sadness is a state of sin.
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There is a law in life: When one door closes to us another one opens.
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It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
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How do you know that the fruit is ripe? Simply because it leaves the branch.
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If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one's youth, one's greatest indignation would be for what one has become.
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The young people who come to me in the hope of hearing me utter a few memorable maxims are quite disappointed. Aphorisms are not my forte, I say nothing but banalities.... I listen to them and they go away delighted.
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The abominable effort to take one’s sins with one to paradise.
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With each book you write you should lose the admirers you gained with the previous one.
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