Andre Malraux
Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man's fate.Collection: Art
To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less.Collection: Business
An art book is a museum without walls.Collection: Art
Then I despair... I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Failure
Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.
Man knows that the world is not made on a human scale; and he wishes that it were.
There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.
Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real.
The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.
War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously.
And when man faces destiny, destiny ends and man comes into his own.
Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.
The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell.
To the humblest among them, who may be listening to me now, I want to say that the masterpiece to which you are paying historic homage this evening is a painting which he has saved.
Genius is not perfected, it is deepened. It does not so much interpret the world as fertilize itself with it.
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.
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.
Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.
The truth about a man lies first and foremost in what he hides.Collection: Lying
He who has dreamed for long resembles his dream.Collection: Dream
To understand what the outside of an aquarium looks like, it's better not to be a fish.Collection: Aquariums
An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.Collection: Art
Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the coarse or centuries, have enabled man to be less enslavedCollection: Art
If you can't make art, make your life a work of art.Collection: Art
The twenty-first century will be spiritual or it will not be.Collection: Spiritual
In the realm of human destiny, the depth of man's questionings is more important than his answers.Collection: Destiny
What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.Collection: Men
I don't argue with my enemies; I explain to their children.Collection: Children
The most important thing in life is to see to it that you are never beaten.Collection: Things In Life
There's no such thing as a grown up person.Collection: Nature
If man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?Collection: Men
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.Collection: Stars
The basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man.Collection: Men
A political leader is necessarily an imposter since he believes in solving life's problems without asking its question.Collection: Believe
The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis.Collection: Art
The next century's task will be to rediscover its gods.Collection: Religious
One can fool life for a long time, but in the end it always makes us what we were intended to be.Collection: Life
Nothing is harder than to get people to think about what they are going to do.Collection: Thinking
The terrible thing about death is that it transforms life into destiny.Collection: Destiny
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.Collection: Art
A break in the established order is never the work of chance. It is the outcome of a man's resolve to turn life to account.Collection: Men
As for the outside world, the artist is confronted by what he sees; but what he sees is primarily what he looks at.Collection: Artist
If we cannot shape our destiny there as no such thing as witchcraft.Collection: Destiny
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.Collection: Order
Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet loves poetry and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a person who responds to figures and landscapes. He is primarily one who loves pictures.Collection: Love Picture
The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.Collection: Art
Surely that little pseudo-gothic church on Broadway, hidden amongst the skyscrapers, is symbolic of the age! On the whole face of the globe the civilization that has conquered it has failed to build a temple or a tomb.Collection: Civilization
History may clarify our understanding of the supreme work of art, but can never account for it completely; for the Time of art is not the same as the Time of history.Collection: Art
Since 1789 history has had a new perspective, revolution being a successful revolt, and revolt a revolution that has failed.Collection: Successful