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

More quotes by Andre Gide

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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.
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There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.
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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, “seeing that his work was good.”
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Let the dead bury the dead. There is not a single word of Christ to which the Christian religion has paid less attention.
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The scholar seeks truth, the artist finds.
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God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.
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It is good to follow one's own bent, so long as it leads upward.
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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.
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They establish distinctions and reserves which I cannot apply to myself, for I exist only as a whole my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it.
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Only fools don't contradict themselves
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We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.
Andre Gide
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Wisdom comes not from reason but from love.
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There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.
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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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Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.
Andre Gide
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'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
Andre Gide
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Never have I been able to settle in life. Always seated askew, as if on the arm of a chair ready to get up, to leave.
Andre Gide
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We call happiness a certain set of circumstances that makes joy possible. But we call joy that state of mind and emotions that needs nothing to feel happy.
Andre Gide
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Envying another man's happiness is madness you wouldn't know what to do with it if you had it.
Andre Gide
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Each thought becomes an anxiety in my brain. I am becoming the ugliest of all things: a busy man.
Andre Gide