Andre Malraux Quotations

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

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

An art book is a museum without walls.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Then I despair... I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always.

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.

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

Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

No one can endure his own solitude.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He who has dreamed for long resembles his dream.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Every great masterpiece is a purification of the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Seldom is a Gothic head more beautiful than when broken.

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

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

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.

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.

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

War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously.

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

All art is a revolt against man's fate.

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

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.

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.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has been talk of the risks this painting took by leaving the Louvre. But the risks taken by the boys who landed one day in Normandy-to say nothing of those who had preceded them 25 years before-were much more certain.

The total sacrifice to a cause beyond his comprehension restored a richness to man