Daily Inspiration Quote by Andre Gide

Gide’s line refuses the cozy fantasy that morality is mostly a matter of private cleanliness. “Work and struggle” sounds like Protestant grit, but in Gide’s mouth it’s less sermon than provocation: ethics isn’t a mood, it’s a practice that costs you something. The imperative cadence does the heavy lifting. No metaphors, no pretty consolations, just verbs that insist on motion. He frames goodness not as purity but as exertion, implying that a passive life isn’t neutral; it’s complicity with whatever “evil” is already ambient.

The real sharp edge is the qualifier: “an evil that you can change.” Gide isn’t asking for grandstanding or martyrdom. He’s drawing a boundary between performative outrage and actual agency, a distinction that feels almost tailor-made for modern politics, where denunciation often substitutes for action. That clause also smuggles in a challenge: you have to do the uncomfortable inventory of what you can change, which usually includes more than you’d like to admit. “Never accept” targets the quiet bargains people make to stay comfortable, employed, liked.

Context matters: Gide lived through the Dreyfus Affair’s institutional antisemitism, two world wars, and the ideological seductions of the early 20th century; he also publicly revised his own flirtations with Soviet communism after witnessing its repression. His moral voice comes from watching “necessary” evils get normalized by intelligent people. The sentence is a compact antidote to that normalization: don’t dignify inertia as realism when you still have leverage.