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Quotes by

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

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 rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist. – 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

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

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

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

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

There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself. – Andre Breton

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

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Natures chief masterpiece is writing well. – Andre Breton

Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession. – Andre Breton

Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself. – Andre Breton

All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. – Andre Breton

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

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

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all. – Andre Breton