André Malraux quotes - page 3

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:

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux

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

André Malraux

One can like that the meaning of the word "art" is to try to make men aware of the greatness that they ignore in them.

André Malraux

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.

André Malraux