Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by Andre Breton

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

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

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

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.

Words make love with one another.

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

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

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

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

I love you on the surface of seas Red like the egg when it is green

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!

My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.

Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.

The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.

The eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror... if it has only the capacity to reflect.

Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

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

A game: say something. Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Like this (she closes her eyes): Two, two what? Two women. What do they look like? Wearing black. Where are they? In a park. . . . And then, what are they doing? Try it, it's so easy, why don't you want to play? You know, that's how I talk to myself when I'm alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only silly stories: actually, I live this way altogether.

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.

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level.

When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?

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.

The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows

It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.

Every time you date someone with an issue that you have to work to ignore, you're settling.

Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale.

The imaginary is what tends to become real.

The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.

At the outset, it is only liking, not understanding, that matters. Gaps in understanding ... are not only important, they are perhaps even welcome, like clearings in the woods, the better to allow the heart's rays to stream out without obstacle. The unlit shadows should remain obscure, which is the very condition of enchantment.

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.

The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.

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 at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.

Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does...The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph...Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.

A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

Dada is a state of mind.

I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.

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.

Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.

Words have finished flirting. Now they are making love.

The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly

There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.

I am the soul in limbo.

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principle problems of life.

May night continue to fall upon the orchestra

Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.

I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like."

Trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur.