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

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

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

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. Genius is not perfected, it is deepened. It does not so much interpret the world as fertilize itself with it. An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please. You can only make art that talks to the masses when you have nothing to say to them. If you can’t make art, make your life a work of art.

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. The basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man. The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell. Then I despair… I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always.

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

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. 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. The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis. The only domain where the divine is visible is that of art, whatever name we choose to call it.

Men are perhaps indifferent to power… What fascinates them in this idea, you see, is not real power, it’s the illusion of being able to do exactly as they please. The king’s power is the power to govern, isn’t it? But man has no urge to govern–he has an urge to compel, as you said. To be more than a man, in a world of men. To escape man’s fate, I was saying. Not powerful–all-powerful. The visionary disease, of which the will to power is only the intellectual justification, is the will to god-head–every man dreams of being god.

In the realm of human destiny, the depth of man’s questionings is more important than his answers. A political leader is necessarily an imposter since he believes in solving life’s problems without asking its question. 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. To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less.

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

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

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

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~Georges André Malraux was a French novelist, art theorist, and minister of cultural affairs. Malraux’s novel La Condition Humaine won the Prix Goncourt. He was appointed by President Charles de Gaulle as information minister and subsequently as France’s first cultural affairs minister during de Gaulle’s presidency.

Excerpts from André Malraux’s works.

©Excellence Reporter 2023