Andre Breton
All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Dreams
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.Collection: Future
Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.Collection: Science
Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Learning
Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.Collection: Love
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
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.
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
Words make love with one another.
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.
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.
Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.Collection: Dream
The imaginary is what tends to become real.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Dream
Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.Collection: Reality
Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale.Collection: Dream
The eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror... if it has only the capacity to reflect.Collection: Eye
Every time you date someone with an issue that you have to work to ignore, you're settling.Collection: Love You
Words have finished flirting. Now they are making love.Collection: Flirting
It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.Collection: Mirrors
I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like."Collection: Horse
My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Mean
Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.Collection: Steps
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.Collection: Mean
May night continue to fall upon the orchestraCollection: Fall
The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Dream
The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.Collection: Childhood
Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.Collection: Literature
It is impossible for me to envisage a picture as being other than a window, and why my first concern is then to know what it looks out on.Collection: Looks
To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.Collection: Mean
Trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur.Collection: Trust
A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.Collection: Running
I am the soul in limbo.Collection: Soul
At the outset, it is only liking, not understanding, that matters. Gaps in understanding ... are not only important, they are perhaps even welcome, like clearings in the woods, the better to allow the heart's rays to stream out without obstacle. The unlit shadows should remain obscure, which is the very condition of enchantment.Collection: Heart
The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.Collection: Children
The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that followsCollection: Men
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.Collection: Gun
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!Collection: God
Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principle problems of life.Collection: Dream
The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomlyCollection: Gun
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.Collection: Expectations
I love you on the surface of seas Red like the egg when it is greenCollection: Love You
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.Collection: Events