André Malraux Quotes

Toute situation présente au moins un élément positif ; il faut le trouver et travailler dessus.

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.

Vorbele sunt oglinda gandurilor pe care le nutresti.

Tragedy, in our times, is politics.

Though man's feeling for the other-worldly often has recourse to solitude, solitude does not foster its development; rather, it is nourished by communion, to which the church is more propitious than the cemetery.

If a man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?

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.

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.

People judge what they do not understand

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

- Qu'entendez-vous par : l'intelligence ?
- En général ?
- Oui.
Ferral réfléchit.
- La possession des moyens de contraindre les choses ou les hommes.
Gisors sourit imperceptiblement. Chaque fois qu'il posait cette question, son interlocuteur, quel qu'il fût, répondait par le portrait de son désir, ou par l'image qu'il se faisait de lui-même.

ხელოვნების დანიშნულებაა განაცდევინონ ადამიანებს საკუთარი სიდიადე, რომელზეც მათ არც უფიქრიათ

On peut aimer que le sens du mot “art” soit tenter de donner conscience à des hommes de la grandeur qu’ils ignorent en eux.

"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)

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.