André Malraux quotes - page 3

Freedom is not an exchange - it is freedom. (André Malraux)
The twenty-first century will be spiritual or it will not be. View quote
André Malraux
To understand what the outside of an aquarium looks like, it's better not to be a fish. View quote
André Malraux
In the realm of human destiny, the depth of man's questionings is more important than his answers. View quote
André Malraux
If you can't make art, make your life a work of art. View quote
André Malraux
The most important thing in life is to see to it that you are never beaten. View quote
André Malraux
There's no such thing as a grown up person. View quote
André Malraux
To love a painting is to feel that this presence is ... not an object but a voice. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
André Malraux
You can only make art that talks to the masses when you have nothing to say to them. (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. View quote
André Malraux
The mind supplies the idea of a nation, but what gives this idea its sentimental force is a community of dreams. View quote
André Malraux
Every creation is, at its root, the struggle between potential form and imitated form. View quote
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. View quote
André Malraux
If we cannot shape our destiny there as no such thing as witchcraft. View quote
André Malraux
The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
André Malraux
Since 1789 history has had a new perspective, revolution being a successful revolt, and revolt a revolution that has failed. View quote
André Malraux
Our characteristic response to the mutilated statue, the bronze dug up from the earth, is revealing. It is not that we prefer time-worn bas-reliefs, or rusted statuettes as such, nor is it the vestiges of death that grip us in them, but those of life. Mutilation is the scar left by the struggle with Time, and a reminder of it - Time which is as much a part of ancient works of art as the material they are made of, and thrusts up through the fissures, from a dark underworld, where all is at once chaos and determinism. (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. View quote
André Malraux
Some pictures are in the gallery because they belong to humanity and others because they belong to the United States. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
André Malraux