Salvador Dali
Beauty should be edible, or not at all.Collection: Nonsense
What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.Collection: Confusion
I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.Collection: Order
The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secretsCollection: Wine
Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!Collection: Wrinkles
Forever will be you and me.Collection: Forever
Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a mustache - it is better for the health. However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: "Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?" Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of mustaches.Collection: Crazy
Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the futureCollection: Eye
Whatever happens, my audience mustn't know whether I am spoofing or being serious; and likewise I mustn't know either. I am in a constant interrogation; when does the deep and philosophically valid Dali begin, and where does the looney and preposterous Dali end?Collection: Serious
An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.Collection: Women
The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.Collection: People
I tried sex once with a woman and that woman was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Federico Garcia Lorca [the Spanish Surrealist poet]. It was very painful.Collection: Sex
Many people do not reach their eighties because they spend too much time in their forties.Collection: People
Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. Accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of artCollection: Art
You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dali spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn't know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to the movies or the theatre, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous!Collection: Girl
Do not be afraid of perfection - you will never attain it.Collection: Perfection
I'm going to live forever. Geniuses don't die.Collection: Forever
Eroticism, hallucinogenic drugs, nuclear science, Gaudi's Gothic architecture, my love of gold - there is a common denominator in all of it: God is present in everything. The same magic is at the heart of all things, and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God, and the entire universe tends towards the perfection of mankind.Collection: Children
People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.Collection: People
For me, love must be ugly, looks must be divine, and death must be beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images.Collection: Hungry
God is just another artist, like me.Collection: Artist
The problem with the youth of today' is that one is no longer part of it.Collection: Youth Of Today
I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I'm never served a cooked telephone.Collection: Lobster
It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.Collection: Art
The famous soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical camembert oftime and space.Collection: Time
I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression of being completely dumb or I would fling myself on my work with a frenzy, a patience, and a willingness to learn that astonished everybody. But to awaken my zeal, it was necessary to offer me something I liked. Once my appetite had been whetted, I became ravenously hungry.Collection: Teaching
Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.Collection: Communist
I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by the images that I see appear on my canvas.Collection: Fear
I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.Collection: Believe
Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.Collection: Desire
I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.Collection: Men
Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something.... If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ignominiously.Collection: People
Since man's highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most.Collection: Men
Photographic data... is still and ESSENTIALLY THE SAFEST POETIC MEDIUM and the most agile process for catching the most delicate osmoses which exist between reality and surreality. The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality.Collection: Mean
Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali.Collection: Creativity
I’m going to live forever. Geniuses don’t die.Collection: Genius
Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision...Collection: Real