Malraux Quotes & Sayings

Nothing is harder than to get people to think about what they are going to do. — 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 artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival. — 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

Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really ... I keep it out of print. — Mordecai Richler

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

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

Seldom is a Gothic head more beautiful than when broken. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Christ ... an anarchist who succeeded. That's all. — Andre Malraux

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

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

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

He who has dreamed for long resembles his dream. — Andre Malraux

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

Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man's fate. — 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 political leader is necessarily an imposter since he believes in solving life's problems without asking its question. — 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

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

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

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

War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously. — 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

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

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

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

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years. — Gore Vidal

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

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

Every great masterpiece is a purification of the world. — 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

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

I have heard of you- a kind of revolutionary. Hard to be a revolutionary in the deadly museum business. — Thomas Hoving

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

Malraux says art is our rebellion against man's fate.
La condition humaine is what I have never accepted. That is why I tried to create my own world. — Anais Nin

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

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

Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism. — 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

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

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

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

An art book is a museum without walls. — 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

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

Be careful
with quotations, you can damn anything. — 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

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

Naked girls with the heads of Marx and Malraux prone and helpless in the glare of the headlights, tried to give them a little joie de vivre but maybe it didn't take, their constant bickering and smallness, it's like a stroke of lightning, the world reminds you of its power, tracheotomies right and left, I am spinning, my pretty child, don't scratch, pick up your feet, the long nights, spent most of my time listening, this is a test of the system, this is only a test. — Donald Barthelme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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