Daily Inspiration Quote by Andre Gide

"Therefore" is the dress uniform of logic: crisp, obedient, marching from premise to conclusion. Gide bars it from the poet's vocabulary because poetry, as he understood it, isn’t a courtroom brief. It’s an instrument for recording inner weather - contradictory, impulsive, more sensation than syllogism. The prohibition is less about one word than about a whole posture toward meaning: the suspicion that art collapses when it starts behaving like an argument.

Gide wrote in a moment when the French novel and intellectual life were increasingly tempted by systems - moral, political, aesthetic. A "therefore" promises that the world adds up neatly, that experience can be reduced to a chain of reasons. Gide’s work often resists that comfort. His characters self-justify, betray their own ideals, and discover that sincerity doesn’t always look rational. The line reads like a warning label against the kind of writing that mistakes coherence for truth.

The subtext is slyly polemical: poets don’t prove, they reveal. They build meanings by association, by echo, by tension between images. A logical connector like "therefore" tries to force a single direction onto language, flattening ambiguity into verdict. Gide isn’t anti-intellect; he’s anti-closure. He’s defending the artist’s right to leave the reader in a charged uncertainty, where the point isn’t to arrive but to feel the pressure of not arriving.

It’s also a rebuke to moralizing art. "Therefore" smuggles in a lesson. Gide’s poet refuses the smugness of conclusion, choosing the riskier honesty of unresolved experience.