André Malraux Quotes

If modern painters feel qualms about applying the term "masterpiece" to describe a work of capital importance, this is because it has come to convey a notion of perfection: a notion that leads to much confusion when applied to artists other than those who made perfection their ideal.

No one can endure his own solitude.

Противно на предположенията на неговите приятели и най-вече на враговете му, величието не е нещо, което той вярва, че притежава; той го обслужва, знейки, че всъщност то обслужва него. Така и Свети Бернар беше в услуга на Христа – от когото очакваше много... За генерала величието беше преди всичко самота, но самота, в която той не се чувстваше сам.

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.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

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.

Στους πιο ανθρώπινους από τους ανθρώπους, δεν αρέσουν οι επαναστάσεις. Τους αρέσουν οι βιβλιοθήκες και τα νεκροταφεία.
A

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.

… The deepest opposition [between the West and India] rests on the fact that the fundamental evidence of the West, whether Christian or atheist, is death, whatever meaning the West gives to it, whereas India’s fundamental evidence is the infinite of life in the infinite of time: “Who could kill immortality?”

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.

A mon âge, on ne voyage plus sans bibliothèque.

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.

What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

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.

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.