André Malraux quotes - page 2

André Malraux was a French novelist, art theorist, and statesman known for his adventurous life and profound cultural influence. His writings explored themes of war, art, and the human condition, and he played an important role in French politics as Minister of Cultural Affairs. He remains celebrated for bridging literature, philosophy, and public service. Here are 83 of his quotes:

No one can endure his own solitude.

André Malraux

War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously.

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

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."

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

Every great masterpiece is a purification of the world.

André Malraux

The sons of torture victims make good terrorists.

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

"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.

André Malraux