Top 70 André Malraux Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.”

— André Malraux

2. “He who has dreamed for long resembles his dream.”

— André Malraux

3. “The twenty-first century will be spiritual or it will not be.”

— André Malraux

4. “To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less.”

— André Malraux

Featured in: Leadership Quotes, Service Quotes

5. “What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.”

— André Malraux

6. “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.”

— André Malraux

7. “An art book is a museum without walls.”

— André Malraux

8. “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.”

— André Malraux

9. “If you can’t make art, make your life a work of art.”

— André Malraux

10. “The most important thing in life is to see to it that you are never beaten.”

— André Malraux

11. “There’s no such thing as a grown up person.”

— André Malraux

12. “The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis.”

— André Malraux

13. “If man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?”

— André Malraux

14. “The basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man.”

— André Malraux

15. “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.”

— André Malraux

16. “In the realm of human destiny, the depth of man’s questionings is more important than his answers.”

— André Malraux

17. “An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.”

— André Malraux

18. “To understand what the outside of an aquarium looks like, it’s better not to be a fish.”

— André Malraux

19. “Every great masterpiece is a purification of the world.”

— André Malraux

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

— André Malraux

21. “No one can endure his own solitude.”

— André Malraux

22. “Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.”

— André Malraux

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

— André Malraux

24. “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.”

— André Malraux

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

— André Malraux

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

— André Malraux

27. “The terrible thing about death is that it transforms life into destiny.”

— André Malraux

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

— André Malraux

29. “Every young man’s heart is a graveyard in which are inscribed the names of a thousand dead artists but whose only actual denizens are a few mighty, often antagonistic, ghosts.”

— André Malraux

30. “A political leader is necessarily an imposter since he believes in solving life’s problems without asking its question.”

— André Malraux

31. “All art is a revolt against man’s fate.”

— André Malraux

32. “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.”

— André Malraux

33. “The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.”

— André Malraux

34. “Be careful – with quotations, you can damn anything.”

— André Malraux

35. “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.”

— André Malraux

36. “An individualism which has got beyond the stage of hedonism tends to yield to the lure of the grandiose. It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation.”

— André Malraux

37. “I don’t argue with my enemies; I explain to their children.”

— André Malraux

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

— André Malraux

39. “The next century’s task will be to rediscover its gods.”

— André Malraux

40. “Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet loves poetry and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a person who responds to figures and landscapes. He is primarily one who loves pictures.”

— André Malraux

41. “Youth is a religion from which one always ends up being converted.”

— André Malraux

42. “The mind supplies the idea of a nation, but what gives this idea its sentimental force is a community of dreams.”

— André Malraux

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

— André Malraux

44. “The thrill of creation which we experience which we experience when we see a masterpiece is not unlike the feeling of the artist who created it; such a work is a fragment of the world which he has annexed and which belongs to him alone.”

— André Malraux

45. “The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival.”

— André Malraux

46. “One can fool life for a long time, but in the end it always makes us what we were intended to be.”

— André Malraux

47. “War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously.”

— André Malraux

48. “Nothing is harder than to get people to think about what they are going to do.”

— André Malraux

49. “In so far as he is a creator, the artist does not belong to a social group already moulded by a culture, but to a culture which he is by way of building up.”

— André Malraux

50. “Surely that little pseudo-gothic church on Broadway, hidden amongst the skyscrapers, is symbolic of the age! On the whole face of the globe the civilization that has conquered it has failed to build a temple or a tomb.”

— André Malraux