André Malraux Quotes

Tous souffrent, songea-t-il, et chacun souffre parce qu'il pense.

No one can endure his own solitude.

لا يحدث للإنسان ما يستحقه, بل ما يشبهه

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

The West regards as truth what the Hindu regards as appearance (for if human life, in the age of Christendom, was doubtless an ordeal it was certainly truth and not illusion), and the Westerner can regard knowledge of the the universe as the supreme value, while for the Hindu the supreme value is accession to the divine Absolute....
But the most profound difference is based on the fact that the fundamental reality for the West, Christian or athiest, is death, in whatever sense it may be interpreted --- while the fundamental reality for India is the endlessness of life in the endlessness of time: Who can kill immortality?

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.

"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)

What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

An art book is a museum without walls.

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.

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

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.

You have not come back from hell with empty hands.

...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.

Vorbele sunt oglinda gandurilor pe care le nutresti.