Top 100 Surrealism's Quotes
#1. 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
#3. As an evil cultist, I make an excellent evil cultist. Only I'm stupid, and not evil. And I worship nothing, really.
Will Advise
#4. Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all
Nikolai Gogol
#5. It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.
Andre Breton
#6. MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.
Donald Barthelme
#7. An immense body, encircling my delirium, a body made of wind and sunlight, crouching and stretching, encompassed the existence of the slightest human echo.
Joe Bousquet
#8. In an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self.
Milton Glaser
#9. Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.
Susan Sontag
#10. Strictly speaking, it might not be a dream. It was reality, but a reality imbued with all the qualities of a dream. A different sphere of reality, where - at a special time and place - imagination had been set free.
Haruki Murakami
#11. There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase.
You lift a gun from the glove compartment
and toss it out the window into the desert heat.
Billy Collins
#12. Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
Salvador Dali
#13. I think it was more personal, but I certainly tried to adapt certain concepts of Surrealism.
Trevor Dunn
#14. There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.
Andre Breton
#17. The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.
Andre Breton
#19. They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars.
Greg Egan
#20. Let us not mince words: The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beauitful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful
Andre Breton
#21. [David] Maraniss sees [Barack] Obama as a man with a moviegoer's or writer's sensibility, where he is both participating and observing himself participating, and views much of the political process as ridiculous or surreal, even as he is deep into it.
Jane Mayer
#22. Fighting for freedom" is a myth. There's only freedom in uniting. You're not really free with an, "Us vs Them" mentality; because you are constantly defending yourself. And in fighting, there's no time for freedom.
Jason Daniel Chaplin
#23. Oh, sheep. I've lost all my sobbing colours.
Dave McKean
#24. Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.
Marcel Duchamp
#25. Harton thought that if one squeezed humanity through a wine press, its essence would flow out as drops of policemen.
Georges Limbour
#26. The imaginary is what tends to become real.
Andre Breton
#27. Jesus to Pilate:
"The trouble is," the bound man went on, not stopping by anyone, "that you are too closed off and have definitely lost faith in people. You must agree, one can't place all one's affection in a dog. Your life is impoverished, Hegemon.
Mikhail Bulgakov
#28. I couldn't even picture Mavis's face anymore. It was sad. She was being erased. I wanted to put my finger on her forehead, but there was nothing there.
James Tate
#30. 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
#31. But in those first hours after you take it, your brain is tuned in like nothing you can imagine. Eyes like the Hubble telescope, sensing light that's not even on the spectrum. You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that's exactly right every time.
David Wong
#32. We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.
Andre Breton
#33. Oh,' said a very white body as it threw a wrist watch to the ground which broke without attracting anyone's attention, 'Oh, how can anyone not love poetry, natural machines, large white houses, the brilliance of steel, crimes and wild passions?
Robert Desnos
#34. 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
#35. That's a beautiful speech, but nobody's listening. Let's go.
Alfred Jarry
#36. 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
#37. One can show one's contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one's life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.
Alfred Jarry
#38. Now the night's breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks.
Joe Bousquet
#39. There's only one woman left in the absence of thought that characterizes in pure black this cursed era.
Andre Breton
#40. This is the most beautiful night of all, the lightning filled night: day, compared to it, is night.
Andre Breton
#41. [On Jason Mashak's "I Was Trained to See Shadows", in his poetry book SALTY AS A LIP:] A nice bit of smooth, full-bodied, surreal story telling. I like it.
John Bennett
#42. 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
#44. ... I know that if I were mad, after several days of confinement I should take advantage of any lapses in my madness to murder anyone, preferably a doctor, who came near me. At least this would permit me, like the violent, to be confined in solitary. Perhaps they'd leave me alone.
Andre Breton
#45. [David] Salle's earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood.
Janet Malcolm
#46. How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise.
Andre Breton
#47. Oh incomprehensible pederasts, I shall not heap insults upon your great degradation; I shall not be the one to pour scorn on your infundibuliform anus. It is enough that the shameful and almost incurable maladies which besiege you should bring with them their unfailing punishments.
Comte De Lautreamont
#48. Three men riding on a bicycle which has only one wheel, I guess that's surrealism.
Dong Kingman
#49. I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.
Arthur Holitscher
#50. I know the new comedy god is surrealism, but it doesn't touch my heart.
Jenny Eclair
#51. Neither I nor the four flippers of the sea-bear of the Boreal ocean have been able to solve the riddle of life.
Comte De Lautreamont
#52. Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.
Jyrki Vainonen
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
Salvador Dali
#56. Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!
Salvador Dali
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#63. 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
#64. Sure, people can make you happy, but no one can stop you from being happy.
Jason Daniel Chaplin
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.
Andre Breton
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. May night continue to fall upon the orchestra
Andre Breton
#75. 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
#76. The Pirate is surrealism and so, in a curious way, is Father of the Bride.
Vincente Minnelli
#77. Surrealism to me is reality. Psychedelic vision is reality to me and always was.
John Lennon
#78. 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
#80. There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.
Andre Breton
#81. Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography.
Tristan Tzara
#82. After realising my natural affinity towards surrealism several years ago I decided to study it's origins and definitions.
Trevor Dunn
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Dali was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life.
Vincente Minnelli
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Happiness is not found in serenity, tranquility or surrealism. It is found in harmony of thoughts, actions, and reality.
Debasish Mridha
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. The act of love and the act of poetry
Are not compatible
With the reading aloud of a newspaper
Andre Breton
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#97. 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
#98. Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were 'sure' of finding shirts.
Frida Kahlo
#99. 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
#100. 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
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