Top 98 Surrealism Quotes & Sayings

Surrealism is anathema for me. Because the surrealists made a joke of everything. And I consider life a tragedy.

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

As far as the style, I was fascinated by surrealism.

My idea is to bring happiness, respect, vision, poetry, surrealism and magic [to design].

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

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

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

Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.

Surrealism - in particular with Salvador Dali - was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism.

Photography has a natural affinity for the strategies of surrealism - the exaltation of chance and eros, the exploration of obsession and the release of the unconscious.

Surrealism runs through the streets.

Todd Solondz is a film maker I've always loved because of how he balances darkness, humour and surrealism in his films.

Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.

Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were 'sure' of finding shirts.

THE ACT OF KILLING invents a new form of cinematic surrealism.

With 'Enter the Void,' I didn't know you could go to this place of surrealism in a movie. I felt sick when I watched it. It really stuck with me.

When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. In doing this, he was practicing surrealism without knowing it.

Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

The end of the surrealism movement was so political, so artistically pure.

Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!

When I was an adolescent, I abandoned my country at 23 years to come to Paris to know Andre Breton, the 'Pope of Surrealism.' And for three years, I was there working with him being a surrealist.

But surrealism is present in most of my pictures.

Absurdity is my favorite brand of humor because deep down inside, in our subconscious, it's all surrealism. It's all abstract. The world is the surrealism, the absurdity, the humor - it all just overlaps.

For me, surrealism is in my blood; it's not an effort.

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.

... a mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the 'decisive moment'.

Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

Dali was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life.

We didn't have MTV, and I was desperate for something. You know, you're young, you want something off the beaten path. And Twin Peaks was like, surrealism on network TV.

MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.

Three men riding on a bicycle which has only one wheel, I guess that's surrealism.

Perhaps because of this, many have looked at my practice in terms of science and technology, however, for me it is just as informed by Surrealism and mythology.

Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.

I think it was more personal, but I certainly tried to adapt certain concepts of Surrealism.

The type of work I do, which is often called 'Pop Surrealism,' is very separate from Gagosian and Mary Boone type of gallery art.

I was raised by boys. I can hold my own, I can fight, and I love horror movies - simply for the scare factor and the surrealism.

Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice

I thought that punk in its original state was a revolutionary movement. But like surrealism, it failed in its revolutionary attempt.

After realising my natural affinity towards surrealism several years ago I decided to study it's origins and definitions.

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.

For 120 minutes, 'Birdman' floats from comedy to surrealism to high drama to quiet brilliance. I felt so inspired by watching this movie. It reaches for the sky and never comes back down to earth.

My cartoon strips in college strived to have the Schulzian mix of surrealism and Charlie Brown angst. A bit of that combo shows up in 'Up.'

Here is a paradox. It would seem that there cannot be surrealism and photography, but only photography or surrealism.

Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.

I love surrealism.

Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.

The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism. That's the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.

The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream.

I know the new comedy god is surrealism, but it doesn't touch my heart.

The surrealism of my pictures was nothing but the real made eerie by vision. I was trying to express reality, for there is nothing more surrealist.

Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end.

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

In an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self.

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.

Surrealism! What is Surrealism? In my opinion, it is above all a reawakening of the poetic idea in art, the reintroduction of the subject but in a very particular sense, that of the strange and illogical.

The Pirate is surrealism and so, in a curious way, is Father of the Bride.

American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.

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

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.