Andre Breton Quotes (24 Quotes)


    The man that cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot

    Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.

    Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

    To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.

    To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery -- even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness -- is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.


    Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

    Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.

    Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.

    Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, infamous, sullying, and grotesque is contained for me in this single word God


    Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

    What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find.

    If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.

    There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.

    To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word God

    Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.

    No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.

    Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

    I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.

    It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.

    The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation . . .

    All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.

    No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.

    In the world we live in. . . everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.


    More Andre Breton Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Life - Future - Art - Learning - Wisdom & Knowledge - God - Science - Fear - Name - Desire - Mastery & Expertise - Beauty - World - Horse - Slavery - Past - Dreams - Memory - View All Andre Breton Quotations

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