Andre Malraux Quotes

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.

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

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

His [Francisco Goya's] debt to the Christianity of the eighteenth century is contained in the idea that politics was just adopting from the Gospels: the conviction that man has a right to justice. Such a statement would seem utterly conceited to a Roman, who would doubtless have looked upon the Disasters as we look upon photographs of the amphitheatre ... But if Goya thought that man has not come onto the earth to be cut to pieces he thought that he must have come here for something. Is it to live in joy and honour? Not only that; it is to come to terms with the world. And the message he never ceased to preach, a message underlined by war, is that man only comes to terms with the world by blinding himself with childishness.

A break in the established order is never the work of chance. It is the outcome of a man's resolve to turn life to account.

If man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.

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.

Our civilization ... is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it.

I've been very near death. And you can't imagine the wild elation of those moments- it's the sudden glimpse of the absurdity of life that brings it- when one meets death face to face. The Royal Way (1935)

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

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

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

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 thrill of creation which we experience which we experience when we see a masterpiece is not unlike the feeling of the artist who created it; such a work is a fragment of the world which he has annexed and which belongs to him alone.

As for the outside world, the artist is confronted by what he sees; but what he sees is primarily what he looks at.

The only domain where the divine is visible is that of art, whatever name we choose to call it.

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

Between eigtheen and twenty, life is like an exchange where one buys stocks, not with money, but with actions. Most men buy nothing.

The next century's task will be to rediscover its gods.

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

To the humblest among them, who may be listening to me now, I want to say that the masterpiece to which you are paying historic homage this evening is a painting which he has saved.

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.

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

Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet loves poetry and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a person who responds to figures and landscapes. He is primarily one who loves pictures.

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.

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

Though man's feeling for the other-worldly often has recourse to solitude, solitude does not foster its development; rather, it is nourished by communion, to which the church is more propitious than the cemetery.

History may clarify our understanding of the supreme work of art, but can never account for it completely; for the Time of art is not the same as the Time of history.

In the course of history, all empires have been created with premeditation, by an effort often sustained over several generations. Every power has been Roman to a degree. The United States is the first nation to become the most powerful in the world without having sought to be so. Its exceptional energy and organization have never been oriented toward conquest.

He who has dreamed for long resembles his dream.

Since 1789 history has had a new perspective, revolution being a successful revolt, and revolt a revolution that has failed.

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

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

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

Could we bring ourselves to feel what the first spectators of an Egyptian statue, or a Romanesque crucifixion, felt, we would make haste to remove them from the Louvre. True, we are trying more and more to gauge the feelings of those first spectators, but without forgetting our own, and we can be contented all the more easily with the mere knowledge of the former, without experiencing them, because all we wish to do is put this knowledge to the work of art.

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

I seek the crucial region of the soul where absolute Evil and fraternity clash.

Surely that little pseudo-gothic church on Broadway, hidden amongst the skyscrapers, is symbolic of the age! On the whole face of the globe the civilization that has conquered it has failed to build a temple or a tomb.

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

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.

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

Seldom is a Gothic head more beautiful than when broken.

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

The day may come when, contemplating a world given back to the primeval forst, a human survivor will have no means of even guessing how much intelligence Man once imposed upon the forms of the earth, when he set up the stones of Florence in the billowing expanse of the Tuscan olive-groves. No trace will be left then of the palaces that saw Michelangelo pass by, nursing his grievances against Raphael; and nothing of the little Paris cafes where Renoir once sat beside Cezanne, Van Gogh beside Gauguin. Solitude, vicegerent of Eternity, vanquishes men's dreams no less than armies, and men have known this ever since they came into being and realized that they must die.

Chanel, General De Gaulle and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time.

Some pictures are in the gallery because they belong to humanity and others because they belong to the United States.

For that matter, men are perhaps indifferent to power ... What fascinates them in this idea, you see, is not real power, it's the illusion of being able to do exactly as they please. The king's power is the power to govern, isn't it? But man has no urge to govern
he has an urge to compel, as you said. To be more than a man, in a world of men. To escape man's fate, I was saying. Not powerful
all-powerful. The visionary disease, of which the will to power is only the intellectual justification, is the will to god-head
every man dreams of being god.

In literature, as in Life, one is often astonished by what is chosen by others.

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.

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.

An art book is a museum without walls.

The men of my race arrive on wingless, eyeless ships.

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

In a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, art alone is both subject to time and yet victorious over it.

No one can endure his own solitude.

Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man's fate.

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

The truth about a man lies first and foremost in what he hides.