André Malraux quotes

Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides. (André Malraux)
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.
André Malraux
All art is a revolt against man's fate.
André Malraux
The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves... is what I call hell.
André Malraux
An art book is a museum without walls.
André Malraux
One cannot create an art that speaks to me when one has nothing to say.
André Malraux
Be careful, -- with quotations you can damn anything.
André Malraux
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.
André Malraux
On this earth of ours where everything is subject to the passing of time, one thing only is both subject to time and yet victorious over it: the work of art.
André Malraux
To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less.
André Malraux
There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman. (André Malraux)
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.
André Malraux
The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival.
André Malraux
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.
André Malraux
Chanel, General De Gaulle and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time.
André Malraux
Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real.
André Malraux
If a man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?
André Malraux
What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.
André Malraux
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.
André Malraux
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.
André Malraux
Athirst for personal salvation, the West forgets that many religions had but a vague notion of the life beyond the grave; true, all great religions stake a claim on eternity, but not necessarily on man's eternal life. (André Malraux)
Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.
André Malraux
Youth is a religion from which one always ends up being converted.
André Malraux
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.
André Malraux
Man knows that the world is not made on a human scale; and he wishes that it were.
André Malraux