Quotes from Andre Malraux

The men of my race arrive on wingless, eyeless ships.

There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.

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

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.

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.

In art, we are the first heirs of all the earth. . . . Accidents impair and Time transforms, but it is we who choose.

To love a painting is to feel that this presence is ... not an object but a voice.

The truth of a man is first and foremost what he hides.

The truth about a man lies first and foremost in what he hides.

Genius is not perfected, it is deepened. It does not so much interpret the world as fertilize itself with it.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

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 enslaved

In the realm of human destiny, the depth of man's questionings is more important than his answers.

One cannot create an art that speaks to men when one has nothing to say.

Man knows that the world is not made on a human scale; and he wishes that it were.

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.

To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less.

If you can't make art, make your life a work of 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.

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.

An art book is a museum without walls.

The only domain where the divine is visible is that of art, whatever name we choose to call it.

Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.

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.