Top 100 Quotes About Surrealism
#1. The Pirate is surrealism and so, in a curious way, is Father of the Bride.
Vincente Minnelli
#2. I guess Surrealism has a draw for me because it's an unknown world. It's a world of subconscious. Some things you can't really get your hands on very easily. Things that are kind of nebulous and they feel like they're not completely formed. You have to feel your way through that.
Gotye
#3. When I was an adolescent, I abandoned my country at 23 years to come to Paris to know Andre Breton, the 'Pope of Surrealism.' And for three years, I was there working with him being a surrealist.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#4. Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end.
Henry Miller
#5. Our Onirisme movement was a synthesis between the Romantic Fantastique and Surrealism. Dimov and I rejected automatic writing. We loved surrealist painters: Chirico, Magritte, Tanguy and especially Brauner (also a Romanian), who never respected the laws that Breton imposed in his manifests.
Dumitru Tepeneag
#6. 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.
Andre Breton
#7. When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.
Salman Rushdie
#10. Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!
Salvador Dali
#11. Photography has a natural affinity for the strategies of surrealism - the exaltation of chance and eros, the exploration of obsession and the release of the unconscious.
Douglas McCulloh
#12. I was raised by boys. I can hold my own, I can fight, and I love horror movies - simply for the scare factor and the surrealism.
Jessica Stroup
#13. When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. In doing this, he was practicing surrealism without knowing it.
Guillaume Apollinaire
#14. Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were 'sure' of finding shirts.
Frida Kahlo
#16. One can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence.
Andre Breton
#17. Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.
Salvador Dali
#18. Surrealism, then, neither aims to subvert realism, as does the fantastic, nor does it try to transcend it. It looks for different means by which to explore reality itself.
Michael Richardson
#19. I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.
Nicholas Royle
#20. Surrealism to me is reality. Psychedelic vision is reality to me and always was.
John Lennon
#21. The activities of these parasites and degenerates gave rise to Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Pointillism, Constructivism, Orphism, Surrealism, Dada, and also Impossibleism, Supersurrealism, Dynamic Double-Dog Realism, Ishkabibbleism, and Mama, which is like Dada only nicer.
Daniel Pinkwater
#22. Dali was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life.
Vincente Minnelli
#23. Multi-colored lights flashed and glared on the wet road and cast eerie reflections, reminiscent of artistic surrealism. Fillion imagined that his distress and anger swirled and moved with the refracted lights, creating an urban masterpiece of demented fury.
Jesikah Sundin
#24. Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.
John Lennon
#25. After realising my natural affinity towards surrealism several years ago I decided to study it's origins and definitions.
Trevor Dunn
#27. Happiness is not found in serenity, tranquility or surrealism. It is found in harmony of thoughts, actions, and reality.
Debasish Mridha
#28. The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.
Graham Joyce
#29. The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.
Andre Breton
#30. I think it was more personal, but I certainly tried to adapt certain concepts of Surrealism.
Trevor Dunn
#31. Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
Salvador Dali
#32. Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.
Susan Sontag
#33. In an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self.
Milton Glaser
#34. MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.
Donald Barthelme
#35. It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.
Andre Breton
#36. The end of the surrealism movement was so political, so artistically pure.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#37. I know the new comedy god is surrealism, but it doesn't touch my heart.
Jenny Eclair
#38. Three men riding on a bicycle which has only one wheel, I guess that's surrealism.
Dong Kingman
#41. I've always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That's what I've always done.
Jeff Koons
#42. Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing ... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice
Greil Marcus
#43. Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.
Andre Breton
#44. This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.
Salman Rushdie
#45. The type of work I do, which is often called 'Pop Surrealism,' is very separate from Gagosian and Mary Boone type of gallery art.
Molly Crabapple
#46. I was thinking of the word Surrealistic ... I don't think it should be used exclusively with my photographs. The meaning is close but I think my tendencies are more toward the whimsical or absurd. Surrealism is more connected with morbidity. From that I am very far away.
Eva Fuka
#47. The surrealism of my pictures was nothing but the real made eerie by vision. I was trying to express reality, for there is nothing more surrealist.
Brassai
#48. Here is a paradox. It would seem that there cannot be surrealism and photography, but only photography or surrealism.
Rosalind E. Krauss
#49. I learned in English class about surrealists. It was the first time I wanted to throw myself up so I could be marked present. Surrealism turns the whole world upside down.
A.S. King
#50. Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.
Lorrie Moore
#51. My idea is to bring happiness, respect, vision. poetry, surrealism and magic [to design].
Philippe Starck
#52. Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, whether verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, free from any control by the reason, independent of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.
Andre Breton
#53. Surrealism - in particular with Salvador Dali - was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#54. A mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the 'decisive moment'.
Lee Friedlander
#55. Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
Susan Sontag
#56. Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#57. Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind perceivable through the powers of dream and nightmare.
Salvador Dali
#58. My cartoon strips in college strived to have the Schulzian mix of surrealism and Charlie Brown angst. A bit of that combo shows up in 'Up.'
Bob Peterson
#59. Refusing what Adorno called that 'comfort in the uncomfortable' taken by the fantastic, surrealism seeks to reintegrate man into the universe.
Michael Richardson
#60. Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.
Brad Holland
#61. Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
Octavio Paz
#62. American art in general ... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
John Updike
#63. The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.
Andre Breton
#64. The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism. That's the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.
China Mieville
#65. The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream.
Graham Joyce
#66. Surrealism also refuses the representation of reality: reality can only be; its existence proves its reality. Fiction thereby becomes impossible or is, by definition, false.
Michael Richardson
#67. THE ACT OF KILLING invents a new form of cinematic surrealism.
Werner Herzog
#68. Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
Susan Sontag
#69. Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
Salman Rushdie
#70. I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.
Neil Farber
#71. Surrealism! What is Surrealism? In my opinion, it is above all a reawakening of the poetic idea in art, the reintroduction of the subject but in a very particular sense, that of the strange and illogical.
Paul Delvaux
#72. 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
#74. Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.
Octavio Paz
#75. May night continue to fall upon the orchestra
Andre Breton
#76. Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory.
Andre Breton
#77. Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.
Andre Breton
#78. We can sum up the surrealist distinction between 'literature' and 'poetry' by saying where the former is artificial, fictive and elusive, the latter is natural, real, direct and spontaneous.
Michael Richardson
#79. To his shock, as Saarang turned the first page, the words slowly transformed into small cylinders, except for one-letter words which preferred being spheres, and started rolling toward the vertical edges of the book.
Pawan Mishra
#80. Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.
Jyrki Vainonen
#81. Sure, people can make you happy, but no one can stop you from being happy.
Jason Daniel Chaplin
#82. His thoughts were hemmed in. One can only draw curved lines on the terrestrial sphere which, as they extend, forever meet with themselves. At such intersections we always encounter what we have already seen.
Raymond Queneau
#83. Subconsciously, we all want to be nebula ... In the end, we're all connected. We're all going to become one cloud of light whether you like it or not. We're all made of the same star dust.
Jason Daniel Chaplin
#84. Dimension, Existence, Culture and Identity all splinter and are left behind.
Pink Sound, brothers and sisters. Pinkness. It's dark. It's... flat. It is unexplainable... it is peaceful... it is love...
...it is...
Gus Van Sant
#86. The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
Salvador Dali
#87. I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.
Andre Breton
#88. The shifting sands of the world ... show how much the surrealists were drawn towards an interrogation of what reality actually is. Unlike fabulists of whatever hue, there is a materiality in surrealist writing that resolutely keeps it, one might say, 'down to earth'.
Michael Richardson
#89. Back in our apartment, lights out, The Professor emerged from beneath the bed." - from "The Professor Spends the Night," in issue 4 of Literary Orphans
Joseph Patrick Pascale
#90. The act of love and the act of poetry
Are not compatible
With the reading aloud of a newspaper
Andre Breton
#91. Dreams are memories.
Memories are dreams.
But my time with you hasn't become a dream just yet.
Because the sensation of your kisses
keep me from sleep.
I'm in love,
God help me, I'm in love.
F.K. Preston
#92. A constant human error: to believe in an end to one's fantasies. Our daydreams are the measure of our unreachable truth. The secret of all things lies in the emptiness of the formula that guard them.
Floriano Martins
#93. Being alone in the dark - surrounded by silence, frightful. Thoughts breathe a life of their own; twisting and turning on each other as enemies unto themselves.
Veronica Purcell
#94. Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography.
Tristan Tzara
#95. There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.
Andre Breton
#96. Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.
Pierre Janet
#97. This is the most beautiful night of all, the lightning filled night: day, compared to it, is night.
Andre Breton
#98. The imaginary is what tends to become real.
Andre Breton
#99. Harton thought that if one squeezed humanity through a wine press, its essence would flow out as drops of policemen.
Georges Limbour
#100. Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.
Marcel Duchamp
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