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" "Eh quoi! pensais-je alors, si ton âme avec ton corps doit se dissoudre, réalise au plus tôt la joie. Si peut-être elle est imortelle, n'auras-tu pas l'eternité pour t'occuper à ce qui ne saurait intéresser tes sens? Ce beau pays que tu traverses, vas-tu le dédaigner, te refuser à ses blandices, à cause qu'elles te seront bientôt enlevées? Plus rapide est la traversée, plus avide soit ton regard; plus precipitée est ta fuite, plus sublime soit ton étreinte! Pourquoi donc, amant d'un instant, embrasserais-je moins amoureusement ce que je sais que je ne pourrai pas retenir? Âme inconstante, hâte-toi! Sache que la fleur la plus belle est aussi la plus tôt fanée. Sur son parfum penche-toi vite. L'immortelle n'a pas d'odeur.
André Paul Guillaume Gide (22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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Most people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates: he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don't dare to - they don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone - that is what they suffer from - and so they don't find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia - the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything - but they don't want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value - and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.
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