Andre Malraux Quotes
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.
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.
Some pictures are in the gallery because they belong to humanity and others because they belong to the United States.
In art, we are the first heirs of all the earth. . . . Accidents impair and Time transforms, but it is we who choose.
Chanel, General De Gaulle and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time.
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.
Since 1789 history has had a new perspective, revolution being a successful revolt, and revolt a revolution that has failed.
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.
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.
Our civilization ... is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it.
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.
As for the outside world, the artist is confronted by what he sees; but what he sees is primarily what he looks at.
The mind supplies the idea of a nation but what gives this idea its sentimental force is a community of dreams.