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We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us

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
Rather
Resemble
Lives
Distorted
Running
Portrait
Best
Portraits
Firsts
Drawn
First
Absurd
Prefer
Warping
Risk
Deformed

More quotes by Andre Gide

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He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.
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The world will be saved by one or two people.
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Pay attention only to the form emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always finds an inhabitant. The artist's business is to build the dwelling as for the inhabitant, it is up to the reader to provide him.
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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.
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Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.
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Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.
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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.
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A desire for truth is by no means a need for certitude and it would be unwise to confuse one with the other.
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The individual never asserts himself more than when he forgets himself.
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One should want only one thing and want it constantly. Then one is sure of getting it. But I desire everything, and consequently get nothing.
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Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.
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I do not love men: I love what devours them.
Andre Gide
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Woe to these people who have no appetite for the very dish that their age serves up.
Andre Gide
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It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.
Andre Gide
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I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.
Andre Gide
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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.
Andre Gide
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Too chaste an adolescence makes for a dissolute old age. It is doubtless easier to give up something one has known than something one imagines.
Andre Gide
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Christianity, above all, consoles but there are naturally happy souls who do not need consolation. Consequently Christianity begins by making such souls unhappy, for otherwise it would have no power over them.
Andre Gide
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There's a law in life: whenever a door closes, a new one will open.
Andre Gide
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'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
Andre Gide