Andre Malraux Quotes

All art is a revolt against man's fate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seldom is a Gothic head more beautiful than when broken.

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

He who has dreamed for long resembles his dream.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

An art book is a museum without walls.

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

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

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

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

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

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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