André Malraux Quotes (37 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Antimémoires

André Malraux

André Malraux: 37 quotes6 likes

Famous André Malraux Quotes

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

André Malraux

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

André Malraux book Antimémoires

Antimémoires, preface (1967)
This preface paraphrases a line of dialogue from his own earlier work: "A man is what he hides: a miserable little pile of secrets."
Original: (fr) L'homme est ce qu'il cache : un misérable petit tas de secrets.

“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

André Malraux, TV program: Promenades imaginaires dans Florence, 1975.

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

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

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

André Malraux

Section 2
La condition humaine [Man's Fate] (1933)

André Malraux Quotes about art

“Art is a revolt against fate.”

André Malraux

Part IV, Chapter VII
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

“Could we bring ourselves to feel what the first spectators of an Egyptian statue, or a Romanesque crucifixion, felt, we would make haste to remove them from the Louvre. True, we are trying more and more to gauge the feelings of those first spectators, but without forgetting our own, and we can be contented all the more easily with the mere knowledge of the former, without experiencing them, because all we wish to do is put this knowledge to the work of art.”

André Malraux

Part I, Chapter III
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

“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.”

André Malraux

André Malraux, Préface du Temps du mépris (1935), Malraux citations sur www. fondationandremalraux. org http://fondationandremalraux.org/index.php/citations/

“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.”

André Malraux

Part IV, Chapter VI
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

“One cannot create an art that speaks to me when one has nothing to say.”

André Malraux

L'espoir [Man's Hope] (1938)

“A large share of our art heritage is now derived from peoples whose idea of art was quite other than ours, and even from peoples to whom the very idea of art meant nothing.”

André Malraux

Part I, Chapter V
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

André Malraux Quotes

“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.”

André Malraux

Part III, Chapter VI
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)
Context: 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. It is not a scene that has come alive, but a latent potentiality that has materialized. Suppose that one of the world's masterpieces were to disappear, leaving no trace behind it, not even a reproduction; even the completest knowledge of its maker's other works would not enable the next generation to visualize it. All the rest of Leonardo's oeuvre would not enable us to visualize the Mona Lisa; all Rembrandt's, the Three Crosses or The Prodigal Son; all Vermeer's, The Love Letter; all Titian's, the Venice Pietà; all medieval sculpture, the Chartres Kings or the Naumburg Uta. What would another picture by the Master of Villeneuve look like? How could even the most careful study of The Embarkation for Cythera, or indeed that of all Watteau's other works conjure up L'Enseigne de Gersaint, had it disappeared?

“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

Part IV, Chapter VII
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)
Context: 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.

“It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation.”

André Malraux

Part IV, Chapter I
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)
Context: 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.

“Neither revolution nor war consists in doing what one pleases.”

André Malraux

Part 2, Section 2, Chapter 12
L'espoir [Man's Hope] (1938)
Context: There are not fifty ways of fighting, there is only one, and that is to win. Neither revolution nor war consists in doing what one pleases.

“The great Christian art did not die because all possible forms had been used up; it died because faith was being transformed into piety.”

André Malraux

André Malraux, Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951) Part IV, Chapter VI
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)
Context: 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.

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

André Malraux

“Each form of the sacrosanct was regarded by members of the culture which gave rise to it as a revelation of the Truth; at Byzantium it was not a mere hypothesis that was sponsored by the majesty of the Byzantine style. To us, however, these forms make their appeal as forms alone — in other words, as they would be were they the work of a contemporary (and, since this actually is unthinkable, they affect us in a puzzling manner); or else as so many grandiose vestiges of a faith that has died out. We look at them from outside; they are still emotive, but they are no longer true. Thus we deprive them of what was their most vital element; for a religious civilization that regarded what it revered as a mere hypothesis is inconceivable.”

André Malraux

Part IV, Chapter V
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

“Chanel, General De Gaulle and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time.”

André Malraux

As quoted in Paris, Paris : Journey Into the City of Light‎ (2005) by David Downie, p. 87

“"Why do you fight?"… He kept his wife, his kid, from dying. That was nothing. Less than nothing. If he had had money, if he could have left it to them, he would have been free to go and get killed. As if the universe had not treated him all his life with kicks in the belly, it now despoiled him of the only dignity he could ever possess — his death.”

André Malraux

La condition humaine [Man's Fate] (1933)

“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.”