A Patient Weight

     When I hear myself in conversation, I feel like becoming a Trappist. And all the disgust and exasperation I feel does not correct anything in me. The indulgence others must have to have, at times, to put up with me! There are certain shortcomings of my mind that I know and loathe but that I cannot overcome. If at least I could not be aware of them!
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, Volume I: 1889-1913, Justin O'Brien (tr.), 1912, p. 313.

     If I were to disappear right now, no one could suspect, on the basis of what I have written, the better things I still have to write. What temerity, what assumption of a long life, has allowed me always to keep the most important for the end?! Or, on the contrary, what shyness, what respect for my subject and fear of not yet being worthy of it! ... Thus I put off La Porte etroite [Straight is the Gate, 1909] from year to year. Whom could I persuade that that book is the twin of L'Immoraliste [The Immoralist, 1902] and that the two subjects grew up concurrently in my mind, the excess of one finding a secret permission in the excess of the other and together extablish a balance.
— André Gide, Ibid., Wednesday, 7 February, 1912, p. 318.

     That abominable effort to take one's sin with one to paradise.
     Beware of artistic protestations; the real artist does not sport a red waistcoat and is not eager to talk of his art. Among those who shout so loud, you can be sure that there are not many who, to the immediate success of Pradon, preferred the attentive perfection of the other Phédre.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1913, p. 343.

     The truth is that, as soon as the need to provide for it ceases to force us, we don't know what to do with our life and we waste it wantonly.
 — André Gide, Ibid., p. 344.

     I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts. No one has more deeply meditated or better understood than I Buffon's remark about patience. [Footnote 8: Buffon is reported to have said: "Genius is but a greater aptitude for patience."] I bring it not only to my work but also to the silent waiting that precedes good work.
     All the same, by dint of waiting, I wonder if I have given all that I might have. At times it seems to me that everything I have produced up to now was only to prepare for the rest, merely to train my hand, and that everything important remains to be said. (I have already expressed this idea elsewhere, but I feel the need of repeating it as I do so often to myself." At times it strikes me painfully that I have delayed too much and that many of the books that remain to be written should already have been written.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, Volume II: 1914-1927, 4 October, 1915, p. 104.

     If I had to formulate a credo, I should say God is not behind us. He is to come. He must be sought, not at the beginning, but at the end of the evolution. He is terminal and not initial. He is the supreme and final point toward which all nature tends in time. And since time does not exist for Him, it is a matter of indifference to Him whether that evolution of which He is the summit follows or precedes, and whether He determines it by propulsion or attraction.
     It is through man that God is molded. This is what I feel and believe and what I understand in the words: "Let man be created in Our image." What can all the doctrines of evolution do against that thought?
     This is the gate through which I enter into the holy place, this is the series of thoughts that lead me back to God, to the Gospels, etc. ...
     Will I some day succeed in setting this forth clearly?
     For a long time already I have believed this without knowing it, and now it becomes clear to me through a series of successive illuminations. The reasoning follows.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1916, p. 122.