Andre Breton (1896 – 1966)
French writer, poet and theorist of Surrealism.
Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, infamous, sullying, and grotesque is contained for me in this single word: God.
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.
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.
I say that the eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror – even if the water of that mirror offers some interesting peculiarities… …that eye impresses me as no less dead than the eye of a slaughtered steer if it has only the capacity to reflect – what if it reflects the object in one or in many aspects, in repose or in motion, in waking or in dream? The treasure of the eye is elsewhere! Most artists are still for tuning around the hands of the clock… …without having the slightest concern for the spring hidden in the opaque case. The eye-spring… …Arshile Gorky – for me the first painter to whom the secret have been completely revealed.
L'amour est toujours devant vous. Aimez.
No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
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.
The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.
The simplest surrealist act consists in going into the street with revolvers in your fist and shooting blindly into the crowd as much as possible. Anyone who has never felt the desire to deal thus with the current wretched principle of humiliation and stultification clearly belongs in this crowd himself with his belly at bullet height.
Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society.
La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas.
Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world.
SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, or in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.
The man who can't visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.
L'?il existe ? l'état sauvage.
Let us not mince words.. the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.
"[T]his cancer of the mind which consists of thinking all too sadly that certain things 'are,' while others, which well might be, 'are not.'"
Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.
It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.