Top 40 Quotes & Sayings by Rene Magritte

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Belgian artist Rene Magritte.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

René François Ghislain Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist, who became well known for creating a number of witty and thought-provoking images. Often depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context, his work is known for challenging observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art.

Belgian - Artist | November 21, 1898 - August 15, 1967

Source: Wikipedia

The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.

Rene Magritte

Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.

Rene Magritte

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.

Rene Magritte

Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it.

Rene Magritte

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

Rene Magritte

The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb.

Rene Magritte

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

Rene Magritte

We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world.

Rene Magritte

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.

Rene Magritte

To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.

Rene Magritte

I have few illusions: the cause is lost in advance. As for me, I do my part, which is to drag a fairly drab existence to its conclusion.

Rene Magritte

Too often we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar. I intend to restore the familiar to the strange.

Rene Magritte

I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street.

Rene Magritte

Each thing we see hides something else we want to see.

Rene Magritte

Painting bores me like everything else. Unfortunately, painting is one of the activities - it is bound up in the series of activities - that seems to change almost nothing in life, the same habits are always recurring.

Rene Magritte

No object is stuck with its name so irrevocably that one cannot find another which suits it better.

Rene Magritte

I need to see the original paintings just as little as I have to read the original manuscripts of books.

Rene Magritte

A thing which is present can be invisible, hidden by what it shows

Rene Magritte

I want nevertheless to add that for me the world is a defiance of common sense.

Rene Magritte

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

Rene Magritte

Those who become entangled in these false ideas are prevented from perceiving the Integral Oneness.

Rene Magritte

If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised.

Rene Magritte

Visible things can be invisible. However, our powers of thought grasp both the visible and the invisible – and I make use of painting to render thoughts visible.

Rene Magritte

We are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all.

Rene Magritte

Nothing is confused except the mind.

Rene Magritte

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I'd have been lying!

Rene Magritte

The purpose of art is mystery.

Rene Magritte

The feeling we experience while we look at a picture is not to be distinguished from the picture or from ourselves. the feeling, picture, and ourselves are united in one mystery.

Rene Magritte

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well.

Rene Magritte

An object never serves the same function as its image - or its name.

Rene Magritte

A truly poetic canvas is an awakened dream.

Rene Magritte

Do not accept any explanation of the world either through chance or determinism. You are not responsible for your belief. It is not even you who decides that you are not responsible - and so on to infinity. You are not obliged to believe. There is no point of departure.

Rene Magritte

We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world.

Rene Magritte

My investigations resembled the pursuit of the solution to a problem for which I had three data: the object, the thing connected with it in the shadow of my consciousness, and the light wherein that thing would become apparent.

Rene Magritte

People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images.

Rene Magritte

Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.

Rene Magritte

My painting is visible images that conceal nothing... they evoke mystery. Mystery means nothing. It is unknowable.

Rene Magritte

I detest my past, and anyone else's. I detest resignation, patience, professional heroism and obligatory beautiful feelings. I also detest the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, voices making announcements, aerodynamism, boy scouts, the smell of moth balls, events of the moment, and drunken people.

Rene Magritte