Quotes by
André Malraux |
1901-1976 , French writer & statesman
French novelist, art historian, and statesman who was an active supporter of Gen. Charles de Gaulle and, after de Gaulle was elected president in 1958, served for 10 years as France’s minister of cultural affairs. His major works include the novel La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate); Les Voix du silence (1951; The Voices of Silence), a history and philosophy of world art; and Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale (1952–54; Museum Without Walls).
| 56 quotes | 3,942 visits |
Quotations
| • | In politics, as in grammar, the mistake that everyone makes is declared the rule. 10 |
| • | The truth of a man is first and foremost what he hides. 9 |
| • | Those who believe that power is fun confuse “power” with “abuse of power”. 9 |
| • | It takes 60 years to make a man, and after that he is only good to die. 9 |
| • | If you think about it, Christ is the only truly successful anarchist. 8 |
| • | A man who thinks not of a woman as the complement of a sex, but of sex as the complement of a woman, is ready for love. 8 |
| • | Death is there as irrefutable proof of the absurdity of life. 8 |
| • | I don’t argue with my enemies; I explain to their children. 7 |
| • | Freedom belongs to those who have conquered it. 6 |
| • | In the realm of human destiny, the depth of man’s questionings is more important than his answers. 5 |
| • | Man was born when for the first time, in front of a corpse, he whispered: “Why?” 5 |
| • | Contempt for men is common among politicians, but confidential. 5 |
| • | The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival. 4 |
| • | And when man faces destiny, destiny ends and man comes into his own. 3 |
| • | Chanel, General De Gaulle and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time. 3 |
| • | Ancient Greek mythology is the western of the Renaissance. 3 |
| • | He who has dreamed for long resembles his dream. |
| • | Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved. |
| • | There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman. |
| • | The twenty-first century will be spiritual or it will not be. |
| • | What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets. |
| • | To understand what the outside of an aquarium looks like, it’s better not to be a fish. |
| • | Nothing is harder than to get people to think about what they are going to do. |
| • | One can fool life for a long time, but in the end it always makes us what we were intended to be. |
| • | The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis. |
| • | The most important thing in life is to see to it that you are never beaten. |
| • | An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please. |
| • | The terrible thing about death is that it transforms life into destiny. |
| • | If you can’t make art, make your life a work of art. |
| • | The next century’s task will be to rediscover its gods. |
| • | Genius is not perfected, it is deepened. It does not so much interpret the world as fertilize itself with it. |
| • | An art book is a museum without walls. |
| • | Between 18 and 20, life is like an exchange where one buys stocks, not with money, but with actions. Most men buy nothing. |
| • | 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. |
| • | 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. |
| • | In literature, as in Life, one is often astonished by what is chosen by others. |
| • | Art is a revolt against fate. |
| • | Power must be defined by the possibility of abusing it. |
| • | There are no heroes without an audience. |
| • | Death is not such a serious thing; pain, yes. |
| • | The Museum transforms the work of art into an object. |
| • | The worst suffering is in the loneliness that accompanies it. |
| • | Art is the shortest way from man to man. |
| • | To be king is foolish; what matters is to make a kingdom. |
| • | A man is the sum of his actions, of what he does, of what he can do. Nothing else. |
| • | Like love, art is not pleasure but passion. |
| • | I have enough ideas so that I can be robbed without harming me. |
| • | All sadism seems the delusional will of an impossible possession. |
| • | Men are the vermin of the earth. |
| • | Man can only be built by pursuing what exceeds him. |
| • | There are just wars. There is no just army. |
| • | The supreme force of art and love is to force us to want to exhaust the inexhaustible in them. |
| • | Youth attracts demagogues like honey attracts flies. |
| • | There is no dignity and there is no real life for the man who works twelve hours a day without knowing why he works. |
| • | Culture is what makes man more than an accident of the universe. |
