Andre-Malraux Quotes

“Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.”

— Andre-Malraux

“What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.”

— Andre-Malraux

“The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.”

— Andre-Malraux

“I don't argue with my enemies; I explain to their children.”

— Andre-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.”

— Andre-Malraux

“The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell.”

— Andre-Malraux

“Be careful
with quotations, you can damn anything.”

— Andre-Malraux

“In a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, art alone is both subject to time and yet victorious over it.”

— Andre-Malraux

“In literature, as in Life, one is often astonished by what is chosen by others.”

— Andre-Malraux

“For that matter, men are perhaps indifferent to power ... What fascinates them in this idea, you see, is not real power, it's the illusion of being able to do exactly as they please. The king's power is the power to govern, isn't it? But man has no urge to govern
he has an urge to compel, as you said. To be more than a man, in a world of men. To escape man's fate, I was saying. Not powerful
all-powerful. The visionary disease, of which the will to power is only the intellectual justification, is the will to god-head
every man dreams of being god.”

— Andre-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.”

— Andre-Malraux

“An art book is a museum without walls.”

— Andre-Malraux

“I seek the crucial region of the soul where absolute Evil and fraternity clash.”

— Andre-Malraux

“I've been very near death. And you can't imagine the wild elation of those moments- it's the sudden glimpse of the absurdity of life that brings it- when one meets death face to face. The Royal Way (1935)”

— Andre-Malraux

“The day may come when, contemplating a world given back to the primeval forst, a human survivor will have no means of even guessing how much intelligence Man once imposed upon the forms of the earth, when he set up the stones of Florence in the billowing expanse of the Tuscan olive-groves. No trace will be left then of the palaces that saw Michelangelo pass by, nursing his grievances against Raphael; and nothing of the little Paris cafes where Renoir once sat beside Cezanne, Van Gogh beside Gauguin. Solitude, vicegerent of Eternity, vanquishes men's dreams no less than armies, and men have known this ever since they came into being and realized that they must die.”

— Andre-Malraux

The men of my race arrive on wingless, eyeless ships.

— Andre-Malraux

His [Francisco Goya's] debt to the Christianity of the eighteenth century is contained in the idea that politics was just adopting from the Gospels: the conviction that man has a right to justice. Such a statement would seem utterly conceited to a Roman, who would doubtless have looked upon the Disasters as we look upon photographs of the amphitheatre ... But if Goya thought that man has not come onto the earth to be cut to pieces he thought that he must have come here for something. Is it to live in joy and honour? Not only that; it is to come to terms with the world. And the message he never ceased to preach, a message underlined by war, is that man only comes to terms with the world by blinding himself with childishness.

— Andre-Malraux