Andre Malraux Quotes

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less.

An individualism which has got beyond the stage of hedonism tends to yield to the lure of the grandiose. It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation.

Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the coarse or centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved

There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.

Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one's ideas, to take a calculated risk - and to act.

Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.

A political leader is necessarily an imposter since he believes in solving life's problems without asking its question.

The twenty-first century will be spiritual or it will not be.

I don't argue with my enemies; I explain to their children.

There's no such thing as a grown up person.

In the realm of human destiny, the depth of man's questionings is more important than his answers.

The first duty of a leader is to make himself be loved without courting love. To be loved without 'playing up' to anyone - even to himself.

To love a painting is to feel that this presence is ... not an object but a voice.

Nothing is harder than to get people to think about what they are going to do.

An art book is a museum without walls.

And when man faces destiny, destiny ends and man comes into his own.

The great Christian art did not die because all possible forms had been used up; it died because faith was being transformed into piety. Now, the same conquest of the outside world that brought in our modern individualism, so different from that of the Renaissance, is by way of relativizing the individual. It is plain to see that man's faculty of transformation, which began by a remaking of the natural world, has ended by calling man himself into question.

He who has dreamed for long resembles his dream.

An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.

If we cannot shape our destiny there as no such thing as witchcraft.

To understand what the outside of an aquarium looks like, it's better not to be a fish.

The terrible thing about death is that it transforms life into destiny.

Even the West has known the architecture of empty space, whose object, for thousands of years, has been less to construct divine houses, than to create sacred places, to seize upon mystery and to immerse man in it-whether by raising the cyclopean pedestal that surrounds him with stars, or by hollowing out the sanctuary that wraps him in haunted night.

In so far as he is a creator, the artist does not belong to a social group already moulded by a culture, but to a culture which he is by way of building up.

The most important thing in life is to see to it that you are never beaten.

The mind supplies the idea of a nation, but what gives this idea its sentimental force is a community of dreams.

If you can't make art, make your life a work of art.

The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis.

Christ...an anarchist who succeeded. That's all.

One cannot create an art that speaks to men when one has nothing to say.

Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.

Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real.

There are not fifty ways of fighting, there's only one, and that's to win. Neither revolution nor war consists in doing what one pleases.

Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.

Our characteristic response to the mutilated statue, the bronze dug up from the earth, is revealing. It is not that we prefer time-worn bas-reliefs, or rusted statuettes as such, nor is it the vestiges of death that grip us in them, but those of life. Mutilation is the scar left by the struggle with Time, and a reminder of it - Time which is as much a part of ancient works of art as the material they are made of, and thrusts up through the fissures, from a dark underworld, where all is at once chaos and determinism.

All art is a revolt against man's fate.

The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival.

There are not fifty ways of fighting, there is only one: to be the conqueror.

Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.

One can fool life for a long time, but in the end it always makes us what we were intended to be.

If modern painters feel qualms about applying the term "masterpiece" to describe a work of capital importance, this is because it has come to convey a notion of perfection: a notion that leads to much confusion when applied to artists other than those who made perfection their ideal.

The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.

Here, reality is not subordinated to painting, indeed painting seems the handmaid of reality, though we feel it tending towards a procedure which, while not at the mercy of appearances, is not yet in conflict with them.

The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.

The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell.

The truth of a man is first and foremost what he hides.

You can only make art that talks to the masses when you have nothing to say to them.

In ceasing to subordinate creative power to any supreme value, modern art has brought home to us the presence of that creative power throughout the whole history of art.

Every creation is, at its root, the struggle between potential form and imitated form.