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Could We Bring Ourselves To Feel What The First Spectators Of An Egyptian Statue, Or A Romanesque Crucifixion, Felt, We Would Make Haste To Remove Them From The Louvre. True, We Are Trying More And More To Gauge The Feelings Of Those First Spectators, But Without Forgetting Our Own, And We Can Be Contented All The More Easily With The Mere Knowledge Of The Former, Without Experiencing Them, Because All We Wish To Do Is Put This Knowledge To The Work Of Art.

-Andre Malraux

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Could We Bring Ourselves

Andre Malraux

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Could We Bring Ourselves To Feel What The First Spectators Of An Egyptian Statue, Or A Romanesque Crucifixion, Felt, We Would Make Haste To Remove Them From The Louvre. True, We Are Trying More And More To Gauge The Feelings Of Those First Spectators, But Without Forgetting Our Own, And We Can Be Contented All The More Easily With The Mere Knowledge Of The Former, Without Experiencing Them, Because All We Wish To Do Is Put This Knowledge To The Work Of Art.

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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.

Here, Reality Is Not Subordinated To Painting, Indeed Painting Seems The Handmaid Of Reality, Though We Feel It Tending Towards A Procedure Which, While Not At The Mercy Of Appearances, Is Not Yet In Conflict With Them.

There's No Such Thing As A Grown Up Person.

Seldom Is A Gothic Head More Beautiful Than When Broken.

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.

Youth Is A Religion From Which One Always Ends Up Being Converted.

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.

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.

To Command Is To Serve, Nothing More And Nothing Less.

As For The Outside World, The Artist Is Confronted By What He Sees; But What He Sees Is Primarily What He Looks At.

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.

The Terrible Thing About Death Is That It Transforms Life Into Destiny.

The Mind Supplies The Idea Of A Nation, But What Gives This Idea Its Sentimental Force Is A Community Of Dreams.

Always, However Brutal An Age May Actually Have Been, Its Style Transmits Its Music Only.

The Truth Of A Man Is First And Foremost What He Hides.

In Art, We Are The First Heirs Of All The Earth. . . . Accidents Impair And Time Transforms, But It Is We Who Choose.

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.

There Is Always A Need For Intoxication: China Has Opium, Islam Has Hashish, The West Has Woman.

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.

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.

Man Is Not What He Thinks He Is, He Is What He Hides.

To Understand What The Outside Of An Aquarium Looks Like, It's Better Not To Be A Fish.

A Political Leader Is Necessarily An Imposter Since He Believes In Solving Life's Problems Without Asking Its Question.

One Can Fool Life For A Long Time, But In The End It Always Makes Us What We Were Intended To Be.

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.

Between Eigtheen And Twenty, Life Is Like An Exchange Where One Buys Stocks, Not With Money, But With Actions. Most Men Buy Nothing.

If Man Is Not Ready To Risk His Life, Where Is His Dignity?

Athirst For Personal Salvation, The West Forgets That Many Religions Had But A Vague Notion Of The Life Beyond The Grave; True, All Great Religions Stake A Claim On Eternity, But Not Necessarily On Man's Eternal Life.

He Who Has Dreamed For Long Resembles His Dream.

Every Creation Is, At Its Root, The Struggle Between Potential Form And Imitated Form.

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.

Every Great Masterpiece Is A Purification Of The World.

The Attempt To Force Human Beings To Despise Themselves Is What I Call Hell.

Even The West Has Known The Architecture Of Empty Space, Whose Object, For Thousands Of Years, Has Been Less To Construct Divine Houses, Than To Create Sacred Places, To Seize Upon Mystery And To Immerse Man In It-whether By Raising The Cyclopean Pedestal That Surrounds Him With Stars, Or By Hollowing Out The Sanctuary That Wraps Him In Haunted Night.

No One Can Endure His Own Solitude.

All Art Is A Revolt Against Man's Fate.

And When Man Faces Destiny, Destiny Ends And Man Comes Into His Own.

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.

There Are Not Fifty Ways Of Fighting, There Is Only One: To Be The Conqueror.

In The Realm Of Human Destiny, The Depth Of Man's Questionings Is More Important Than His Answers.

Since 1789 History Has Had A New Perspective, Revolution Being A Successful Revolt, And Revolt A Revolution That Has Failed.

I Don't Argue With My Enemies; I Explain To Their Children.

If You Can't Make Art, Make Your Life A Work Of Art.

The World Of Art Is Not A World Of Immortality But Of Metamorphosis.

Be Careful -- With Quotations, You Can Damn Anything.

Opium Teaches Only One Thing, Which Is That Aside From Physical Suffering, There Is Nothing Real.

An Artist Discovers His Genius The Day He Dares Not To Please.

Genius Is Not Perfected, It Is Deepened. It Does Not So Much Interpret The World As Fertilize Itself With It.

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.

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.

The Twenty-first Century Will Be Spiritual Or It Will Not Be.

To Love A Painting Is To Feel That This Presence Is ... Not An Object But A Voice.

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.

In Ceasing To Subordinate Creative Power To Any Supreme Value, Modern Art Has Brought Home To Us The Presence Of That Creative Power Throughout The Whole History Of Art.

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.

The Artist Is Not The Transcriber Of The World, He Is Its Rival.

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.

War Puts Its Questions Stupidly, Peace Mysteriously.

The Basic Problem Is That Our Civilization, Which Is A Civilization Of Machines, Can Teach Man Everything Except How To Be A Man.

Our Characteristic Response To The Mutilated Statue, The Bronze Dug Up From The Earth, Is Revealing. It Is Not That We Prefer Time-worn Bas-reliefs, Or Rusted Statuettes As Such, Nor Is It The Vestiges Of Death That Grip Us In Them, But Those Of Life. Mutilation Is The Scar Left By The Struggle With Time, And A Reminder Of It - Time Which Is As Much A Part Of Ancient Works Of Art As The Material They Are Made Of, And Thrusts Up Through The Fissures, From A Dark Underworld, Where All Is At Once Chaos And Determinism.

The Only Domain Where The Divine Is Visible Is That Of Art, Whatever Name We Choose To Call It.

The Truth About A Man Lies First And Foremost In What He Hides.

Chanel, General De Gaulle And Picasso Are The Three Most Important Figures Of Our Time.

One Cannot Create An Art That Speaks To Men When One Has Nothing To Say.

The Next Century's Task Will Be To Rediscover Its Gods.

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If We Cannot Shape Our Destiny There As No Such Thing As Witchcraft.

Christ...an Anarchist Who Succeeded. That's All.

You Can Only Make Art That Talks To The Masses When You Have Nothing To Say To Them.

The Most Important Thing In Life Is To See To It That You Are Never Beaten.

Some Pictures Are In The Gallery Because They Belong To Humanity And Others Because They Belong To The United States.

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The Present Age Delights In Unearthing A Great Man's Secrets; For One Thing Because We Like To Temper Our Admiration And Also Perhaps We Have A Vague Hope Of Finding A Clue To Genius In Such "revelations."

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Keeping Secrets

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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.

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

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.

Could We Bring Ourselves To Feel What The First Spectators Of An Egyptian Statue, Or A Romanesque Crucifixion, Felt, We Would Make Haste To Remove Them From The Louvre. True, We Are Trying More And More To Gauge The Feelings Of Those First Spectators, But Without Forgetting Our Own, And We Can Be Contented All The More Easily With The Mere Knowledge Of The Former, Without Experiencing Them, Because All We Wish To Do Is Put This Knowledge To The Work Of Art.

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.

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.

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