Andre Breton (1896 – 1966)
French writer, poet and theorist of Surrealism.
Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world.
Truly the eye was… …made to cast a lineament, a conducting wire between the most heterogeneous things. Such a wire, of maximum ductility, should allow us to understand, in a minimum of time, the relationship which connect, without possible discharge of continuity, innumerable physical and mental structures… …the key (of the mental prison, ed.) lies in a free unlimited pay of analogies… …one can admire today a canvas signed by Gorky, “The liver is the Cock’s Comb”, which should be considered the great open door to the analogy world.
What I have loved, whether I have kept it or not, I shall love forever.
As we liked to do as children, , extracting from the soft forest floor the light chestnut trees only a few centimeters high at the base of which the chestnut continues to shine to the sun its clods of soil from the past, the chestnut conserving all of its presence and witnessing with its presence the power of green hands, of shadow, of airy white or pink pyramids of dances… and of future chestnuts which, under new dust, would be discovered by the marveled sight of other children. It is in this perspective that the work of Hans Arp, more than any other, should be situated. He found the most vital in himself in the secrets of this germinating life where the most minimal detail is of the greatest importance, where, on the other hand, the distinction between the elements becomes meaningless, adopting a peculiar under the rock humor permanently.
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.
It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.
"[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.'"
Let us not mince words.. the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.
L'?il existe ? l'état sauvage.
The man who can't visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.
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.
Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, infamous, sullying, and grotesque is contained for me in this single word: God.
La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas.
Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society.
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.
The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.
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.
No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
L'amour est toujours devant vous. Aimez.