Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Andre Breton (French Poet, Critic)

André Breton (1896–1966) was a French poet, essayist, critic, and editor. He was a founder, theorist, and chief promoter of the Surrealist movement.

Born in Tinchebray, Normandy, Breton became interested in mental illness as a medical student. He read the works of Sigmund Freud (whom he met in 1921) and got introduced to the notion of the psyche. Influenced by psychiatry and Symbolist poetry, he enlisted the Dadaist group in 1916. He was a co-founder of the avant-garde magazine Dada: Recueil Littérature et Artistique (1919, ‘Dada: Literary and Artistic Review.’) In 1930, he joined the Communist Party for a time and spent the war years in America.

Breton collaborated with Philippe Soupault to write Les Champs magnétiques (1920, ‘Magnetic Fields,’) one of the first experiments in automatic writing. In 1922, he turned to Surrealism, and, in 1924, he published Manifeste du surrealism (‘Surrealist Manifesto ‘) and Poisson Soluble (‘Soluble Fish,’) and became editor of La Révolution surréaliste (1924–30.)

Breton later wrote two other Surrealist manifestos (1930,) and Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme? (1934; What is Surrealism?, 1936.) Breton separated from the Communist Party in 1935 but remained committed to Marxist ideals. When Germany occupied France, Breton escaped to the United States. His major novel was Nadja (1928; Nadia, 1960,) which blends the irrational and the everyday. His verses were published as Poèmes (1948) in Paris, and as Selected Poems (1969) in London.

The American art historian and literary critic Mary Ann Caws wrote the biography Andre Breton (1971.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Andre Breton

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

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