Accept Acceptance

....Not a word too many; not a line, not one of the remarks in the dialogue, that is not revelatory. It is a perfect object. [La Fontaine's The Wolf and the Lamb] But the taste for perfection is being lost, and I foresee a time when it will even cause people to smile indulgently as one smiles at children's games, when the "quod decet," harmonious ponderation, the nuance, and art, in short, will yield to qualities of impact and to practical considerations, when the fact alone will matter. "Somber pleasure of a melancholy heart," it will be all up with you! Here begins the virile age, the age of reality.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide: Volume IV: 1939-1949, 1943, p. 216.

     And likewise for the mollusk and its shell. Likewise constantly and everywhere in nature the solution is inseparable from the problem. Or rather: there is no problem; there are only solutions. Man's mind invents the problem afterward. He sees problems everywhere. It's screaming.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1947, from Autumn Leaves, p. 276.

     Take things, not for what they claim to be, but for what they are.
     Play the game with the hand one has.
     Insist upon oneself as one is.
     This does not keep one from struggling against all the lies, falsifications, etc., that men have contributed to and imposed on a natural state of things, against which it is useless to revolt. There is the inevitable and the modifiable. Acceptance of the modifible is in no wise included in amor fati.
     This does not keep one, either from demanding of oneself the best, after one has recognized it as such. For one does not make oneself any more lifelike by giving precedence to the less good.
— André Gide, Ibid., p. 280.

....And it is in this regard that the leaders of the new generation, who gauge a work according to its immediate efficacy, differ most from us. They also aim for an immediate success, whereas we considered it quite natural to remain unknown, unappreciated, and disdained until after forty-five. We were banking on time, concerned only with forming a lasting work like those we admired, on which time has but little hold and which aspire to seem as moving and timely tomorrow as today.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1948, p. 288.

     I once wrote, I don't know now just where [footnote: Chiefly in Les Nouvelles Nourritures of 1935....], that I was certainly not indifferent to the fate of the world after I should cease to be here to suffer from or enjoy it. This  is true, and I have often shown myself (or more precisely pretended) to be more optimistic than I was in reality. Some days, if I let myself go, I should screame with despair. But a few glimmers of true virtue, self-sacrifice, nobility, and dignity are enough to obliterate the discouraging accumulation of stupidity, gluttony, and abjection. The sparks of virtue seem to me more dazzling by contrast. And I am willing to admit that, without them, our sorry world would be but an incoherent tissue of absurdities. But there they are, nevertheless, and I intend to count on them.
— André Gide, So Be It or The Chips are Down, Justin O'Brien (tr.),
p. 44.