If modern painters feel qualms about applying the term "masterpiece" to describe a work of capital importance, this is because it has come to convey a notion of perfection: a notion that leads to much confusion when applied to artists other than those who made perfection their ideal.

Andre Malraux

Categorized in : Artist Confusion Qualms About

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

Andre Malraux

vision military leadership

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

Andre Malraux

men culture art

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

Andre Malraux

twenties spiritual firsts

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

Andre Malraux

secret men thinking

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

Andre Malraux

islam west needs

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

Andre Malraux

keeping-secrets littles men

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

Andre Malraux

political leader believe

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.

Andre Malraux

success motivational inspirational

I don't argue with my enemies; I explain to their children.

Andre Malraux

arguing children enemy

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.

Andre Malraux

leader inspirational firsts

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

Andre Malraux

harder people thinking

There's no such thing as a grown up person.

Andre Malraux

nature persons

The great Christian art did not die because all possible forms had been used up; it died because faith was being transformed into piety. Now, the same conquest of the outside world that brought in our modern individualism, so different from that of the Renaissance, is by way of relativizing the individual. It is plain to see that man's faculty of transformation, which began by a remaking of the natural world, has ended by calling man himself into question.

Andre Malraux

christian men art

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

Andre Malraux

destiny important men

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

Andre Malraux

dream giving ideas

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.

Andre Malraux

building-up groups artist

He who has dreamed for long resembles his dream.

Andre Malraux

dream long

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

Andre Malraux

painting voice feels

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

Andre Malraux

fishes aquariums looks

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

Andre Malraux

life-and-death destiny terrible