Andre Malraux Quotes That Are philosophical, poetic and humanistic

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Man is a dog's ideal of what God should be.

An art book is a museum without walls.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

No one can endure his own solitude.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.