The Great Good Gide

RULE OF CONDUCT
     Pay no attention to appearing. Being is alone important.
     And do not long, through vanity, for a too hasty manifestation of one's essence.
     Whence: do not seek to be through the vain desire to appear; but rather because it is fitting to be so.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, Volume I: 1889-1913, 1890, Justin O'Brien (tr.), p. 8.

     Human laziness is infinite. It is the triumph of inertia over more delicate laws. It is sometimes called wisdom; it prevents what is coming from arriving too quickly.
     Very few people really love life; the horror of any change is a proof of this. The thing they least like to change, with their lodging, is their thought. Wife, friends come afterwards; but lodging and thought involve too great an effort. There you have squatted and there you stay. You furnish the surroundings to your taste, making everything resemble you as closely as possible. You avoid any opportunity for anything to contradict. It is a mirror, a prepared approbation. In this environment you don't live; you take root. Very few, I assure you, really love life.
     Listen to people talk. Who listens to another? The contradictors? Not at all. You listen only to those who repeat your thoughts. The more it is expressed as you would have expressed it yourself, the more willingly you listen. The skill of popular journalists lies in making the imbecile who reads them say: "That's exactly what I was thinking!" We want to be flattered, not rubbed the wrong way. Oh, how slow is the succession of time! What long efforts to move from one place to another! And how we rest between struggles! How, at the least slope, we sit down!
— André Gide, Ibid., 1896, pp. 84-85.

     Gourmont does not understand that all intelligence is not on the side of free thought, and all stupidity on the side of religion; that the artist needs liesure for his work and that nothing keeps the mind so busy as free inquiry and doubt. Skepticism is perhaps sometimes the beginning of wisdom, but it is often the end of art.
— André Gide, Ibid., 3 November, 1905, p. 153.

....He is young and has time to return to nature. But I am frightened by an artist who starts from the simple; I fear that he will end up, not with the complex, but with the complicated.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1908, p. 237.

     Locating the idea of perfection, not in equilibrium and the middle path, but in the extreme and exaggeration is perhaps what will most set off our period and distinguish it most annoyingly.
     To succeed on this plane, one must agree never to be embarrassed by anything. The "quod decet" of art is thc first obstacle to be forgotten....
     The work of art blossoms forth only with the participation, the connivance of all the virtuous elements of the mind.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1910, p. 270.