Andre Malraux's Quotes

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

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

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.

Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man's fate.

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.

The first duty of a leader is to make himself be loved without courting love. To be loved without 'playing up' to anyone - even to himself.

And when man faces destiny, destiny ends and man comes into his own.

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

An art book is a museum without walls.

Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.

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

Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real.

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

Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.

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

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.

There are not fifty ways of fighting, there's only one, and that's to win. Neither revolution nor war consists in doing what one pleases.