Andre Malraux Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Genius is not perfected, it is deepened. It does not so much interpret the world as fertilize itself with it.

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

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.

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

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.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

Be careful
with quotations, you can damn anything.

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

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

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

He who has dreamed for long resembles his dream.

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

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

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.

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

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

Man knows that the world is not made on a human scale; and he wishes that it were.

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

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

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

Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.

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

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

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

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

An art book is a museum without walls.

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

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

No one can endure his own solitude.

War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously.

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

Every great masterpiece is a purification of the world.

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

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

In art, we are the first heirs of all the earth ... Accidents impair and Time transforms, but it is we who choose.

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

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

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

Youth is a religion from which one always ends up being converted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man.

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

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

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

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.

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

Seldom is a Gothic head more beautiful than when broken.