Quotes by Georges André Malraux

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Art is an anti-destiny... the whole history of art should be a history of liberation.

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"To understand a work" is as confusing an expression as "to understand a man." It is not about making a work intelligible, but about awakening the reader's sensitivity to what constitutes its value.

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I believe in the eternal man because I believe in the eternity of the masterpiece... the eternity of those images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

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The great artist establishes man's eternal identity with himself...

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Art is not a religion. But the creative artist certainly obeys a vocation, which is not that of pleasing, and relates irresistibly in the definition that the dictionary gives to faith: "total adhesion of heart and mind".

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Art is born from the fascination of the imperceptible, from the refusal to copy performances; from the will to tear away the forms of the world which man endures in order to make them enter into that which he governs.

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A great novelist must compete with life.

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The greatest mystery is not that we are thrown between the depth of matter and that of the stars; but that, in this dungeon, we draw out of ourselves, images strong enough to deny our nothingness... All art is the struggle against destiny, against the consciousness of what carries the cosmos as indifferent to man and threatening; earth and death.

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One of the meanings of the word art is to try to make people aware of the greatness that exists within them and which they ignore.

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An artist is not necessarily more sensitive than an amateur and often less than a teenage girl; he is otherwise sensitive. Being Romanian does not mean being a novelist, preferring contemplation is not being a poet... a musician loves music and not nightingales, a poet loves lyrics and not sunsets... a painter is not, above all, a man who loves clips and landscapes; he is a man who loves paintings.

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What do we call an artist, creator or not?... Any person who NEEDS an art.

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Art is born not of a way of seeing the world, but of doing it.

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Art seems to me a rectification of the world, a means of escaping the human condition... in its essentials, art is a humanization of the world.

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All art is man transcending his destiny.

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Neither art nor culture are the adornments of beauty; they are fierce conquests of man to exalt, before the real world, a world that belongs only to man.

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What is the importance of what only matters to me?