Andre Breton Quotes
Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.
Every time you date someone with an issue that you have to work to ignore, you're settling.
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.
The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.
The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.
I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.
It is impossible for me to envisage a picture as being other than a window, and why my first concern is then to know what it looks out on.
No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
There is By my leaning over the precipice Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion My finding the secret Of loving you Always for the first time
It will in the end, be admitted that everything, in effect is an image and that the least object which has no symbolic role assigned to it is capable of standing for absolutely anything.
The eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror... if it has only the capacity to reflect.
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.
The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly
In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.
Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins.
Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.
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.
When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?
I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.
For me, the single word "God" suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque.
If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.
Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.'
Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.
How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise.
Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.