Wandering Wonderment

     I wonder whether ... No, I don't wonder anything. The whole world, and I to begin with, is merely a series of replies to questions that, all things considered, it is not really necessary, nor even expedient, to ask. Since the question can only come too late.
     Understanding is asking yourself a certain question to which what you understand becomes the very exact reply.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide: Volume III: 1928-1939, Justin O'Brien (tr.), 18 May, 1929, p. 53.

     The love of truth is not the need of certainty and it is very unwise to confuse one with the other.
     One can love the truth all the more while not believing it ever possible to reach an absolute toward which nevertheless that fragmentary truth leads us.
     I have often been in a position to observe that certain religious minds, and notably the Catholics, are less inclined to pay attention to that partial truth (the only one, however, that we can ever seize) the more they think themselves in possession of a superior Truth to which the whole tangible world and whatever knowledge we can have of it are subordinate. And this is very easily understandable. He who believes the bolt hurled by a God does not observe the lightning; nor the germination of a seed, nor the metamorphosis of an insect, if he is satisfied to recognize in all these natural phenomena a constant miracle and mere obedience to a continuous divine intervention. Likewise he who thinks he is in possession of a dogmatic truth will consider to be in error all those for whom the dogma does not furnish a sufficient reply to their interrogations. All knowledge has as starting-point a skepticism, against which faith stands opposed.
— André Gide, Ibid.,  p. 73.

     My reality always remains slightly fantastic. After all, I never succeed in completely believing in it (any more than in life) and have never been able to subscribe to Gautier's remark: "The artist is a man for whom the outer world exists." How much more often the artist, always somewhat of a mystic, is he who does not believe, not completely, in the reality (in the single reality, at least) of the outer world.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1930, p. 114.

     That self-indulgence to which love invites us, drawing from us not the best but what is most likely to please others; you do not so much raise him as he debases you. The leveling process is of necessity effected at the expense of the superior one.
     What a masterpiece I should write on this subject if only I were  thirty and with the experience of my sixty years! But a whole lifetime is not too much to realize, once awakened from that deception, that you have been tricked. And. naturally, the noblest ones make the best dupes.
— André Gide, Ibid., p. 129.

     "The only ones who should write," writes Poulaille, "are those who have something to say." Id est: something to relate. Those who have seen something.
     What an illusion! And how readily one feels, upon reading this or that reportage, for instance, that — however important and passionately interesting it may be — outside of what he has seen, the author has nothing to say to us. The question begins precisely where Poulaille leaves off.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1935, p. 324.

     There is a certain way of adoring God that strikes me as blasphemy. There is a certain way of negating God that approaches adoration.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1937, p.375.