"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time"
About this Quote
Gide frames exploration as an act of prolonged disorientation, not a triumphal leap. The line’s power is in its refusal to romanticize “new lands” as a reward you simply earn with courage. You don’t get the upgrade without the unpleasant middle: consenting to uncertainty so total it feels like exile. “Consenting” matters. This isn’t fate or accident; it’s a chosen surrender of the metrics that used to reassure you - reputation, routine, the familiar shoreline of who you’ve been.
The subtext is psychological before it’s geographical. The “shore” is social permission, inherited belief, even the comfortable story you tell yourself about your own limits. Gide suggests that real change requires a kind of temporary homelessness: you will look foolish, unmoored, maybe wrong, for longer than you’d like. The “very long time” is the cold splash of realism. Reinvention is slow; clarity doesn’t arrive on schedule.
Contextually, Gide wrote out of a modernist era that distrusted easy certainties and tidy moral scripts. His work often pushed against bourgeois respectability and the policing of desire and identity. Read that way, the quote isn’t a motivational poster about hustle; it’s a warning about what authenticity costs. New territory - artistic, ethical, intimate - comes with a stretch where the old world can’t validate you and the new one hasn’t yet taken shape. The sentence works because it names the price everyone tries to skip, and makes that endurance the actual passport.
The subtext is psychological before it’s geographical. The “shore” is social permission, inherited belief, even the comfortable story you tell yourself about your own limits. Gide suggests that real change requires a kind of temporary homelessness: you will look foolish, unmoored, maybe wrong, for longer than you’d like. The “very long time” is the cold splash of realism. Reinvention is slow; clarity doesn’t arrive on schedule.
Contextually, Gide wrote out of a modernist era that distrusted easy certainties and tidy moral scripts. His work often pushed against bourgeois respectability and the policing of desire and identity. Read that way, the quote isn’t a motivational poster about hustle; it’s a warning about what authenticity costs. New territory - artistic, ethical, intimate - comes with a stretch where the old world can’t validate you and the new one hasn’t yet taken shape. The sentence works because it names the price everyone tries to skip, and makes that endurance the actual passport.
Quote Details
| Topic | Adventure |
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