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The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.
Andre Gide
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Being free is not just about having the ability, but about actively embracing and exercising that freedom.

This quote by Andre Gide highlights the distinction between merely having the potential to attain freedom and the ongoing responsibility to live in a way that genuinely embodies that freedom. It suggests that true freedom is not a passive state but a proactive journey that requires effort and commitment.

Themes

FreedomResponsibilityCapacityTaskLife

In practice

Example use cases

A motivational speaker may use this quote to inspire individuals to take charge of their lives.

More from Andre Gide

Life never presents us with anything which may not be looked upon as a fresh starting point, no less than as a termination.
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Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.
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Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon.
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Through fear of resembling one another, through horror of having to submit, through uncertainty as well, through skepticism and complexity, there is a multitude of individual little beliefs for the triumph of strange little individuals.
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It is the special quality of love not to be able to remain stationary, to be obliged to increase under pain of diminishing.
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It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.
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Quote by Andre Gide | QuoteProject