Andre Malraux Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 92 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Andre Malraux.
Famous Quotes By Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
You can only make art that talks to the masses when you have nothing to say to them. — Andre Malraux
In the realm of human destiny, the depth of man's questionings is more important than his answers. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
Every young man's heart is a graveyard in which are inscribed the names of a thousand dead artists but whose only actual denizens are a few mighty, often antagonistic, ghosts. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
Between eigtheen and twenty, life is like an exchange where one buys stocks, not with money, but with actions. Most men buy nothing. — Andre Malraux
Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
Some pictures are in the gallery because they belong to humanity and others because they belong to the United States. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
One can fool life for a long time, but in the end it always makes us what we were intended to be. — Andre Malraux
Since 1789 history has had a new perspective, revolution being a successful revolt, and revolt a revolution that has failed. — Andre Malraux
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) — Andre Malraux
Genius is not perfected, it is deepened. It does not so much interpret the world as fertilize itself with it. — Andre Malraux
Every creation is, at its root, the struggle between potential form and imitated form. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism. — Andre Malraux
I don't argue with my enemies; I explain to their children. — Andre Malraux
Chanel, General De Gaulle and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time. — Andre Malraux
I seek the crucial region of the soul where absolute Evil and fraternity clash. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
The basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man. — Andre Malraux
Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real. — Andre Malraux
A political leader is necessarily an imposter since he believes in solving life's problems without asking its question. — Andre Malraux
And when man faces destiny, destiny ends and man comes into his own. — Andre Malraux
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness. — Andre Malraux
Athirst for personal salvation, the West forgets that many religions had but a vague notion of the life beyond the grave; true, all great religions stake a claim on eternity, but not necessarily on man's eternal life. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
To understand what the outside of an aquarium looks like, it's better not to be a fish. — Andre Malraux
Man knows that the world is not made on a human scale; and he wishes that it were. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle. — Andre Malraux
To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets. — Andre Malraux
The twenty-first century will be spiritual or it will not be. — Andre Malraux
The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell. — Andre Malraux
There's no such thing as a grown up person. — Andre Malraux
One cannot create an art that speaks to men when one has nothing to say. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously. — Andre Malraux
A large share of our art heritage is now derived from peoples whose idea of art was quite other than ours, and even from peoples to whom the very idea of art meant nothing. — Andre Malraux
Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides. — Andre Malraux
The only domain where the divine is visible is that of art, whatever name we choose to call it. — Andre Malraux
The mind supplies the idea of a nation, but what gives this idea its sentimental force is a community of dreams. — Andre Malraux
Youth is a religion from which one always ends up being converted. — Andre Malraux
As for the outside world, the artist is confronted by what he sees; but what he sees is primarily what he looks at. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
The truth of a man is first and foremost what he hides. — Andre Malraux
The truth about a man lies first and foremost in what he hides. — Andre Malraux
The next century's task will be to rediscover its gods. — Andre Malraux
Every great masterpiece is a purification of the world. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
In art, we are the first heirs of all the earth ... Accidents impair and Time transforms, but it is we who choose. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
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 — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
Be careful
with quotations, you can damn anything. — Andre Malraux
If you can't make art, make your life a work of art. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
An art book is a museum without walls. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman. — Andre Malraux
The present age delights in unearthing a great man's secrets; for one thing because we like to temper our admiration and also perhaps we have a vague hope of finding a clue to genius in such revelations. — Andre Malraux
The men of my race arrive on wingless, eyeless ships. — Andre Malraux
No one can endure his own solitude. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
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. — Andre Malraux
The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world. — Andre Malraux