Andre Malraux Quotes

There is no greater hell than to be a prisoner of fear.

Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

One does not expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the latter is almost forgotten.

In the world of the present, in our time, we feel that suffering, anguish, the torments of body and soul, are greater than ever before in the history of mankind.

Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you're deprived of it.

The very word torture is a disgrace to the human race.

The torture situation is an external conflict, a contest between the subject and his tormentor … drive him [the subject] deeper and deeper into himself until he is no longer able to control his responses in an adult fashion.

On the haggard faces of every man among these prisoners, the same expression sat … It had something of that strained attention which we see upon the faces of the blind ad deaf mingled with a kind of horror as thought they had all been secretly terrified. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body …

There are materials enough in every man's mind to make a hell there.

The imagination is always the best torturer.

To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.

Fancy tortures more people than does reality

I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

Remember the pain?' thought Artemis. I hate myself. I really do.

No ear can hear nor tongue can tell the tortures of the inward hell!

When you were straight, evil thoughts and memories came pouring up out of the darkness inside you; buzzing black flies clinging to the insides of your skull.

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

There are much more terrible things than physical injury.

It was the emotion I hated the most of all emotions, shame.

A man must first despise himself, and then others will despise him.

If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.