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André Gide

André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation between the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straight-laced education and a narrow social moralism. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritan constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, even to the point of owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. His political activity is informed by the same ethos, as suggested by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR.

Quotes

Muhammadhas quoted2 years ago
I create each hour’s newness by forgetting yesterday completely. Having been happy is never enough for me. I don’t believe in dead things. What’s the difference between no longer being and never having been?”
Muhammadhas quoted2 years ago
I exist only as a whole man. I lay claim to nothing but my own nature, and the pleasure I take in an action is my clue to its propriety.”
Muhammadhas quoted2 years ago
lit a cigarette, then threw it away at once. “There is,” he continued, “a ‘sense,’ the others would say, a ‘sense’ you seem to be lacking, my dear Michel.”
“You mean a ‘moral sense,’ ” I said, trying to smile.
“No, just a sense of property.”
“You don’t seem to have much of one yourself.”
“I have so little that nothing you see here belongs to me; not even, or especially not, the bed I sleep on. I have a horror of comfort; possessions invite comfort, and in their security a man falls asleep; I love life enough to try to live wide awake, and so, even among all my treasures, I cherish a sense of the precarious, by which I provoke or at least arouse my life. I can’t say I love danger, but I love a life of risk, I want life to demand of me, at every moment, all my courage, all my happiness, and all my health.”
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