Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
—Andre Breton
The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Public
Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality.
—Andre Breton
No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Example
The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts
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.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Perception, Awareness
Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.
—Andre Breton
No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.
—Andre Breton
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Mind, The Mind
To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!
—Andre Breton
Topics: God
In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Events, Humanity
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.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Dreams
To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery—even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness—is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Imagination
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Love
What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Secrets
Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Beauty
Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do; like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts.
—Andre Breton
It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Existence
There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Liberty
Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Greed
Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.
—Andre Breton
Topics: Understanding
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Hans Hofmann American Painter
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery French Novelist, Aviator
- Robert Hugh Benson English Author, Clergyman
- John Dos Passos American Novelist, Artist
- Albert Camus Algerian-born French Philosopher
- Paul Frank Baer American Army Officer
- Octave Mirbeau French Author
- Michel Foucault French Philosopher
- Jean-Paul Sartre French Philosopher
- Blaise Cendrars Swiss Poet, Writer
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