56 Andre Malraux Quotes

Andre Malraux quotes

1. No one can endure his own solitude.

2. The human mind invents its Puss-in-Boots and its coaches that change into pumpkins at midnight because neither the believer nor the atheist is completely satisfied with appearances.

3. 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.

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

5. 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.

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

7. 'Why do you fight?' ... He kept his wife, his kid, from dying. That was nothing. Less than nothing. If he had had money, if he could have left it to them, he would have been free to go and get killed. As if the universe had not treated him all his life with kicks in the belly, it now despoiled him of the only dignity he could ever possess - his death.

8. The sons of torture victims make good terrorists.

9. La liberte n'est pas un echange, c'est la liberte.

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

11. Il n'y a pas cinquante manieres de combattre, il n'y en a qu'une, c'est d'etre vainqueur. Ni la revolution ni la guerre ne consistent a se plaire a soi-meme.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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.'

17. 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.

18. Once the masterpiece has emerged, the lesser works surrounding it fall into place; and it then gives the impression of having been led up to and foreseeable, though actually it is inconceivable - or, rather, it can only be conceived of once it is there for us to see it. It is not a scene that has come alive, but a latent potentiality that has materialized. Suppose that one of the world's masterpieces were to disappear, leaving no trace behind it, not even a reproduction; even the completest knowledge of its maker's other works would not enable the next generation to visualize it. All the rest of Leonardo's oeuvre would not enable us to visualize the Mona Lisa; all Rembrandt's, the Three Crosses or The Prodigal Son; all Vermeer's, The Love Letter; all Titian's, the Venice Pieta; all medieval sculpture, the Chartres Kings or the Naumburg Uta. What would another picture by the Master of Villeneuve look like? How could even the most careful study of The Embarkation for Cythera, or indeed that of all Watteau's other works conjure up L'Enseigne de Gersaint, had it disappeared?

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. Each form of the sacrosanct was regarded by members of the culture which gave rise to it as a revelation of the Truth; at Byzantium it was not a mere hypothesis that was sponsored by the majesty of the Byzantine style. To us, however, these forms make their appeal as forms alone - in other words, as they would be were they the work of a contemporary (and, since this actually is unthinkable, they affect us in a puzzling manner); or else as so many grandiose vestiges of a faith that has died out. We look at them from outside; they are still emotive, but they are no longer true. Thus we deprive them of what was their most vital element; for a religious civilization that regarded what it revered as a mere hypothesis is inconceivable.

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. Art is a revolt against fate.

29. L'intellectuel est celui qui ordonne sa vie a une idee.

30. Civilization can be defined at once by the basic questions it asks and by those it does not ask.

31. Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love and of thought, which, in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Every great masterpiece is a purification of the world.

9. 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.

10. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

16. 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.

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

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

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

20. Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.

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

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

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

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

25. 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.