Andre Malraux Quotes
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Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.
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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.
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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.
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One cannot create an art that speaks to men when one has nothing to say.
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Christ...an anarchist who succeeded. That's all.
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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.
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Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.
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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.
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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
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Every creation is, at its root, the struggle between potential form and imitated form.
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As for the outside world, the artist is confronted by what he sees; but what he sees is primarily what he looks at.
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Nothing is harder than to get people to think about what they are going to do.
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A political leader is necessarily an imposter since he believes in solving life's problems without asking its question.
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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.
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There are not fifty ways of fighting, there is only one: to be the conqueror.
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All art is a revolt against man's fate.
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Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real.
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There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.
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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.
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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.
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In the realm of human destiny, the depth of man's questionings is more important than his answers.
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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.
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Seldom is a Gothic head more beautiful than when broken.
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The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.
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Since 1789 history has had a new perspective, revolution being a successful revolt, and revolt a revolution that has failed.
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If we cannot shape our destiny there as no such thing as witchcraft.
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Youth is a religion from which one always ends up being converted.
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Every great masterpiece is a purification of the world.
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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.
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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.
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