Andre Gide Quotes

Nothing changes more constantly than the past

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

History is a never ending argument.

When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Memories are just stories we tell ourselves about our past; and that's often why they don't match when we've shared the same experiences with someone.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

History is nothing but a procession of false absolutes.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

History is always changing.

History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it.

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

No two people see things the same way.

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

The word “History” is mostly made up of the word “Story”.

I always think that's neat, when you can hear a story told from different points of view, different perspectives.

There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.

History is about who tells it.

History is a certain way, but you just change the point of view a little bit, and you discover a whole new side of it.

I'm always wary of the lessons of the past. There's a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.