Top 137 Quotes & Sayings by Salvador Dali

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.

The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

Let my enemies devour each other.

Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

I don't do drugs. I am drugs.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!

So little of what could happen does happen.

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.

Life is too short to remain unnoticed

Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.

I do not take drugs. I am drugs.

It is either easy or impossible.

There comes a moment in every person's life when they realise they adore me.

To be interesting, one has to provoke.

Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.

The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless.

You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life

Qui sait déguster ne boit plus jamais de vin, mais goûte des secrets

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.

Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy - the joy of being Salvador Dalí - and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today?

Beauty should be edible, or not at all.

Many people do not reach their eighties because they spend too much time in their forties.

Everything that is contradictory creates life

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.

I am not strange. I am just not normal.

Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.

Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.

I shall be so brief that I have already finished.

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.

If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets