Andre Breton Quotes & Sayings

They rarely discovered a star red as a distant crime or a star-fish. — Andre Breton

Beauty will be convulsive or not at all. — Andre Breton

Man proposes and dispose. He and he alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy. — Andre Breton

We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing. — Andre Breton

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

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

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

How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise. — Andre Breton

Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject. — Andre Breton

The mere word freedom is the only one that still excites me. I deem it capable of indefinitely sustaining the old human fanaticism. It doubtless satisfies my only legitimate aspiration. Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought. It is up to us not to misuse it. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery-even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness-is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. — Andre Breton

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

A game: say something. Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Like this (she closes her eyes): Two, two what? Two women. What do they look like? Wearing black. Where are they? In a park ... And then, what are they doing? Try it, it's so easy, why don't you want to play? You know, that's how I talk to myself when I'm alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only silly stories: actually, I live this way altogether. — Andre Breton

I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys. — Andre Breton

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

My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness. — Andre Breton

I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value, but which, by their absolutely unexpected violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke. — Andre Breton

All my life my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. andre breton — Andre Breton

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. — Andre Breton

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

I find it impossible to think of a picture save as a window, and my first concern about a window is to find out what it looks out on ... and there is nothing I love so much as something which stretches away from me out of sight. — Andre Breton

For me, the single word "God" suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque. — Andre Breton

In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again. — Andre Breton

The greatest hope, I say, is the one in which all the others are met, is that it is exists for everyone and that for everyone it lasts. That the absolute gift of one being to another, which can exist only in reciprocity, be in the eyes of everyone the only natural and supernatural hanging bridge cast across life itself. — Andre Breton

It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself. — Andre Breton

To poke its umbrella tip in the mud of the electric light — Andre Breton

I am the soul in limbo. — Andre Breton

Intellectually, true beauty is very difficult to distinguish a priori from the bloom of youth. — Andre Breton

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. — Andre Breton

... It would be hateful to refuse whatever she asks of me, one way or another, for she is so pure, so free of any earthly tie, and cares so little, but so marvelously, for life. — Andre Breton

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

Words have finished flirting. Now they are making love. — Andre Breton

The act of love and the act of poetry
Are not compatible
With the reading aloud of a newspaper — Andre Breton

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

A word and everything is saved.
A word and all is lost. — Andre Breton

When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas? — Andre Breton

(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood. — Andre Breton

The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood. — Andre Breton

This cancer of the mind which consists of thinking all too sadly that certain things 'are,' while others, which well might be, 'are not. — Andre Breton

At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful. — Andre Breton

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

Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does ... The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph ... Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all. — Andre Breton

We are in front of a fountain, whose jet she seems to be watching. 'Those are your thoughts and mine. Look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it's still prettier when they fall back. And then they dissolve immediately, driven back up with the same strength, then there's that broken spurt again, that fall ... and so on indefinitely. — Andre Breton

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level. — Andre Breton

Past and future monopolize the poet's sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today. — Andre Breton

When the windows like the jackal's eye and desire pierce the dawn, silken windlasses lift me up to suburban footbridges. I summon a girl who is dreaming in the little gilded house; she meets me on the piles of black moss and offers me her lips which are stones in the rapid river depths. Veiled forebodings descend the buildings' steps. The best thing is to flee from the great feather cylinders when the hunters limp into the sodden lands. If you take a bath in the watery patterns of the streets, childhood returns to the country like a greyhound. Man seeks his prey in the breezes and the fruits are drying on the screens of pink paper, in the shadow of the names overgrown by forgetfulness. Joys and sorrows spread in the town. Gold and eucalyptus, similarly scented, attack dreams. Among the bridles and the dark edelweiss subterranean forms are resting like perfumers' corks. — Andre Breton

Trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur. — Andre Breton

It will in the end, be admitted that everything, in effect is an image and that the least object which has no symbolic role assigned to it is capable of standing for absolutely anything. — Andre Breton

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. — Andre Breton

May night continue to fall upon the orchestra — Andre Breton

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

With the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours. — Andre Breton

To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery
even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness
is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be. — Andre Breton

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 follows — Andre Breton

I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own. — Andre Breton

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. — Andre Breton

Words make love with one another. — Andre Breton

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

The double eyelid of the sun rises and falls on life. The birds' feet on the windowpane of the sky are what I used to call stars. The earth itself, whose motion seems so inexplicable as long as one remains beneath the vault, the earth that is webfooted with deserts is itself subject to the laws of migration — Andre Breton

The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros's work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us. — Andre Breton

There's only one woman left in the absence of thought that characterizes in pure black this cursed era. — Andre Breton

Birds will be bored
If I'd forgotten something
Ring the bells of those school dismissals in the sea
What we shall call pensive borage
We start by giving the solution to the contest
To wit how many tears can be held in a woman's hand
1. as little as possible
2. in a medium-sized hand
While I crumple this star-lit paper
And while the everlasting flesh has once and for all taken
possession of the mountain summits
I live like a recluse in a little house in the Vaucluse
Heart king's order — Andre Breton

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances. — Andre Breton

Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality. — Andre Breton

Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale. — Andre Breton

There is By my leaning over the precipice Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion My finding the secret Of loving you Always for the first time — Andre Breton

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. — Andre Breton

I love you on the surface of seas
Red like the egg when it is green
— Andre Breton

There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state. — Andre Breton

Life's greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose. — Andre Breton

This is the most beautiful night of all, the lightning filled night: day, compared to it, is night. — Andre Breton

The imaginary is what tends to become real. — Andre Breton

There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine. To feel the need to vary the object of this temptation, to replace it by others - this bears witness that one is about to be found unworthy, that one has already doubtless proved unworthy of innocence ... — Andre Breton

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

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. — Andre Breton

I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond. — Andre Breton

It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside! — Andre Breton

Again begins the ridiculous, terrible waiting, in which we do not know which object to move, which gesture to repeat - what to do in order to make what we are waiting for happen. — Andre Breton

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

Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten. — Andre Breton

The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise. — Andre Breton

The imaginary is that which tends to become real. — Andre Breton

The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream, the increasing use of which - among others in the domain of the cinema - has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion. — Andre Breton

Over and above the various prejudices I acknowledge, the affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur to me and to me alone- over and above a sum of movements I am conscious of making, of emotions I alone experience- I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognize what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate? — Andre Breton

Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting. — Andre Breton

I will be like Nijinksi, who was taken last year to the Russian ballet, and could not comprehend what spectacle he was viewing. I will be alone, quite alone in myself, indifferent to all the world's ballets. — Andre Breton

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

Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing. — Andre Breton

Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads. — Andre Breton

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

Tell me whom you haunt and I'll tell you who you are. — Andre Breton

Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history. — Andre Breton

Every time you date someone with an issue that you have to work to ignore, you're settling. — Andre Breton

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! — Andre Breton

The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb. — Andre Breton

A woman's hand, your hand in its starry paleness only to help you walk downstairs, refracts its beam into my own. Its slightest touch branches out inside me and in a moment will trace above us those delicate canopies where the inverted sky stirs its blue leaves with misty aspen or willow. As for me, to what do I actually owe this remission of a pain that so many others suffer because of less guilt than I feel today? Before I met you I'd known misfortune, despair. Before I met you, come on, those words mean nothing. You know very well that when I first laid eyes on you I recognized you without the slightest hesitation. And from what borders did you come, so fearfully protected against everyone, what initiation to which no one or almost no one was admitted has consecrated what you are. — Andre Breton

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

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. — Andre Breton

Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself? — Andre Breton

The truth can only be seen when you close your eyes to reason and surrender yourself to dreams. — Andre Breton

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. — Andre Breton