Top 88 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

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.

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.

War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously.

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

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.

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

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

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.

An art book is a museum without walls.

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

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

Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

All art is a revolt against man's fate.

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.

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

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

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

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He who has dreamed for long resembles his dream.

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

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