Faith & Spirit Quote by Andre Gide

Gide’s line lands like a cool heresy: it uses the language of Christian hierarchy to smuggle in a radical defense of the individual against the crowd. “Man” here isn’t the generic species so much as the singular human being, the person as an irreducible moral event. “Men,” by contrast, reads as the plural that politics loves - the mass, the category, the unit you can count, conscript, or educate into sameness. The twist is theological: “God made him and not them in his image.” Gide weaponizes Genesis to argue that the divine imprint isn’t stamped onto collectivities; it’s pressed into each face, each conscience, each private interior life.

The subtext is polemical, and very Gide: a novelist who distrusted bourgeois conformity and the moral bullying of institutions, he frames individuality not as narcissism but as sacred uniqueness. Coming out of late 19th- and early 20th-century France - an era of mass parties, mass war, mass slogans, mass “public opinion” - the sentence reads as an anti-totalizing warning. It also anticipates the 20th century’s grim lesson that atrocities often arrive packaged as arithmetic: the many outweigh the one.

“Each one is more precious than all” is deliberately paradoxical, almost scandalous. It refuses utilitarian math and asserts a stubborn ethic of personhood: no “greater good” can cancel the worth of a single life. Gide’s genius is the bait-and-switch: he borrows the Bible’s authority, then turns it against the modern temptation to treat humans as a crowd-shaped problem.