Andre Breton

It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.

Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society.

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

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

Words make love with one another.

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

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.

The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.

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.

Every time you date someone with an issue that you have to work to ignore youre settling.

Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.

Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.

No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.

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

If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.

The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror... if it has only the capacity to reflect.

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

Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.

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.