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Acceptance
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Welcome anything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.
-Andre Gide, The Fruits of the Earth
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Action(s)
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Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
-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.
-Andre Gide
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Argument & Debate
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Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.
-Andre Gide
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Art
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The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.
-Andre Gide
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Assumptions
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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.
-Andre Gide
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Authors & Writing
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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, Paludes Marshlands
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All these books have lived together ... inside my mind. They follow one another only on paper and because of an utter impossibility to let themselves be all written at the same time. Whatever book I write, I never devote myself to it completely, and the matter which most insistently requires me soon later develops, however, at the other end of me.
-Andre Gide, Journal, September-October 1909
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Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
-Andre Gide
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-Andre Gide
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Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.
-Andre Gide
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Charity
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Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.
-Andre Gide
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Confidence
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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
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Conversation
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The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say -- because they were too obvious.
-Andre Gide, The Journals of Andr
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Death
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Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. Its their way of falling.
-Andre Gide
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Goals
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A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.
-Andre Gide
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Humanity
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Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.
-Andre Gide
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Humanity cherishes its swaddling clothes; but it shall not grow up unless it can free itself from them. Turning down his mother's breast does not make the weaned child ungrateful. ... Rise up naked, valiant; make the sheaths crack; push aside the stakes; to grow straight you need no more than the thrust of your sap and the call of the sun.
-Andre Gide, Les Nouvelles Nourritures Later Fruits of the Earth
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Ideas
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It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.
-Andre Gide
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Imagination
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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, Feuilles de route
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Knowledge
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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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Legacy
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February 13, 1951. No! I cannot claim that with the end of this notebook, of the notebook, all will be settled, that all will have been done. Perhaps I will have the desire to add to this again. To add something. To add. Perhaps. To add to this again at the last moment
http://www.adpf.asso.fr/adpf-publi/folio/textes/gide_ang.rtf
-Andre Gide, the source for this writes: Six days before his death, Gide writes, on a separate sheet of paper
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Logic
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The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.
-Andre Gide
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Mankind, Man
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Man: The most complex of beings, and thus the most dependent of beings. On all that made you up, you depend.
-Andre Gide, Journal
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Paradise, Utopia
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The abominable effort to take one's sins with one to paradise.
-Andre Gide
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Books by and about Andre Gide