Breton Quotes & Sayings

A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it ... — Andre Breton

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

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

The Working Song
by Breton Braley

Oh, we're sick to death of the style of song
That's only a sort of a simpering song,
A kissy song and a sissy song
Or a weepy, creepy, whimpering song.
So give us a lift of a lusty song,
A boisterous, bubbling, boiling song,
Or a smashing song and a dashing song,
Oh, give us the tang of a toiling song,
The chanty loud of the working crowd,
The thunderous thrall of a toiling song!

Ay, sing us a joyous daring song,
Not a moaning, groaning, fretting song,
But a ringing song, and a swinging song,
A rigorous, vigorous, sweating song.
We have had enough of the gypsy song,
Which is only a lazy, shirking song,
So toughen your throat to a rougher note
And give us the tune of a working song,
A tune of strife and the joy of life,
The beat and throb of a working song! — Berton Braley

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise
the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer. — Milan Kundera

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

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton. — Richard Serra

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

A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day in court by dying in the often miserable conditions of the prisons. They too would be salted and put on trial. Breton historians have discovered that in 1784 in the town of Cornouaille, Maurice LeCorre had died in prison and was ordered salted for trial. But due to some bureaucratic error, the corpse did not get a trial date and was found by a prison guard more than seven years later, not only salted but fermented in beer, at which point it was buried without trial. — Mark Kurlansky

I just love Cape Breton fiddling! I think it's very close. They derive their music from Scottish music. Well, in Donegal we're very influenced by Scottish music as well. Independently the two areas became very alike, because they kind of changed the music a bit from Scotland and we did the same. — Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh

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. — Andre Breton

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

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

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

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

This marks an important shift in the function of the north slope, no longer just a source of secure and plentiful water but a place of shrines, worship, and visitation. In a very real sense, this evolution into a place of commemoration and devotion marks the expansion of the sacred space of the Acropolis down its slopes and the opening up of the Sacred Rock to the larger community. This — Joan Breton Connelly

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

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

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

I have said three words too many, too bad, I take them back, I add them. I have several times deserved death, especially in Greece, where I sawed up the palette of an old man who stalked my lady friends right up to my camp bed. I messed up the hairdo of the greatest criminal in Chaldea. For all that I did not have to make use of my daughter native to the lower part of her father's vision, all the plains as far as the eye can see which eat hampers full of mother of pearl. — Paul Eluard

I believe in the pure Surrealist joy of the man who, forewarned that all others before him have failed, refused to admit defeat, sets off from watever point he chooses, along any other pat save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can. — Andre Breton

I am the soul in limbo. — Andre Breton

I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers, the way I surrender myself to those who read me with eyes wide open; in order to stop imposing, in this realm, the conscious rhythm of my thought. — Andre Breton

How I loathe the servitude people try to hold up to me as being so valuable. I pity the man who is condemned to it, who cannot generally escape it, but it is not the burden of his labor that disposes me in his favor, it is
it can only be
the vigor of his protest against it. — Andre Breton

Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.' — 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

... 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

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

Good wares make good markets. — Nicholas 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

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 imaginary is what tends to become real. — Andre Breton

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

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

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

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

Could I but know all, I would have the faith of a Breton peasant woman — Louis Pasteur

Words make love with one another. — Andre Breton

Even that great poverty which had been and remains mine let up for a few days. I was not, as it happens, opposed to this poverty: I accepted to pay the price for not being a slave to life, to settle for the right I had assumed once and for all to not express any ideas but my own. We were not many in doing this ... Poverty passed by in the distance, made lovelier and almost justified, a little like what has been called, in the case of a painter who was one of your first friends, the blue period. It seemed the almost inevitable consequence of my refusal to behave the way almost all the others did, whether on one side or another. This poverty, whether you had the time to dread it or not, imagine it was only the other side of the miraculous coin of your existence: the Night of the Sunflower would have been less radiant without it. — Andre Breton

The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up. — Andre Breton

They both had the same calm and dreamy little cast of mind. They delighted in stories, in old Breton legends, and their favorite sport was to go and ask for them at the cottage-doors, like beggars:
"Ma'am ... " or, "Kind gentleman ... have you a little story to tell us, please?"
And it seldom happened that they did not have one "given" them; for nearly every old Breton grandame has, at least once in her life, seen the "korrigans" dance by moonlight on the heather. — Gaston Leroux

Much ado there was, God wot;
He woold love, and she woold not,
She sayd, "Never man was trewe;"
He sayes, "None was false to you." — Nicholas 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

There is nothing new under the sun, not even Manet. — Jules 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

I think I am the most impressed with writing styles that defy category, like Kharms or Selby, Breton or Jarry, where you become as interested in the writer as much as the writing itself. It's all these things that make reading so appealing to me. — Henry Rollins

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

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

Mr. Breton didn't know about location, location, location. — Daniel Pinkwater

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

My legion has won many victories. And since you are my dearest friend, we will fight that much harder." His intense, dark eyes locked with hers. "I swear to you: Ker-Ys will not fall. — Jennifer McKeithen

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

Marie-Laure sits in her customary spot in the corner of the kitchen, closest to the fireplace, and listens to the friends of Melanie Manec complain ... Nine of them sit around the square table, knees pressed to knees. Ration card restrictions, abysmal puddings, the deteriorating quality of fingernail varnish - these are crimes they feel in their souls. To hear so many of them in a room together confuses and excites Marie-Laure: they are giddy when they should be serious, somber after jokes; Madame Hebrard cries over the nonavailability of Demerara sugar, another woman's complaint about tobacco disintegrates mid sentence into hysterics about the phenomenal size of the perfumer's backside. They smell of stale bread, of stuffy living rooms crammed with dark titanic Breton furnishings. — Anthony Doerr

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

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

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

I had not yet acquired the experience which gives modesty. — Jules Breton

It's like I'm dreaming of the imaginary friend Katie and I had when we were little. She'd been so real to us as kids. We each remembered Anna, that's what we'd called her, just like we remembered bits of our parents. But now, in this dreamscape of Paradise Lost, our imaginary third twin has all grown up. — Beatrice Rose Roberts

I have always had a passion for the beautiful. If the man in me is often a pessimist, the artist, on the contrary, is pre-eminently an optimist. — Jules 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 think we ought to find something else to do," said Mandy. "But Alecto my love, you're the first person to notice my retro diner kitchen. When my parents saw it, they thought I was creating a weird art project."
"I like it. It's got that let's-drown-ourselves-in-better-days type ambiance," Alecto declared, his gray eyes narrowed. — Rebecca McNutt

Day by day his sister grew
Paler with the wound
She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it
Each day with her blue Breton jacket.
- from Life After Death — Ted Hughes

Andre Breton once said that a portrait should not only be an image but an oracle one questions, and that the photographer's aim should be a profound likeness, which physically and morally predicts the subject's entire future. — Bill Brandt

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

Shall we go dance the hay, the hay?
Never pipe could ever play
Better shepherd's roundelay. — Nicholas Breton

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

Now will I rehearse before you a very ancient Breton Lay. As the tale was told to me, so, in turn, will I tell it over again, to the best of my art and knowledge. Hearken now to my story, its why and its reason. — Marie De France

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

You see these young people in Antigonish who are coming from Cape Breton, and these are really smart, attractive young people, who are living in a place that's been very rough economically. It's a very special thing to be helpful there. — Gerry Schwartz

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

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

I wish my deadly foe no worse Than want of friends, and empty purse. — Nicholas Breton

Malachi Smith. Crispin Jones. Suzette Boudrot. Claude Le Breton." Matthew paused as Ransome searched the ledger's entries for the names. "You should have kept them in chronological order instead of alphabetical. That's how I remember them." Ransome — Deborah Harkness

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

We rise with the lark and go to bed with the lamb. — Nicholas Breton

I have travelled around the globe. I have seen the Canadian and American Rockies, the Andes, the Alps and the Highlands of Scotland, but for simple beauty, Cape Breton outrivals them all! — Alexander Graham Bell

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

This young woman," he indicated Miss Wintertowne, "she has, I dare say, all the usual accomplishments and virtues? She was graceful? Witty? Vivacious? Capricious? Danced like sunlight? Rode ilk the wind? Sang like an angel? Embroidered like Penelope? Spoke French, Italian, German, Breton, Welsh and many other languages?"
Mr. Norrell said he supposed so. He believed that those were the sorts of things young ladies did nowadays. — Susanna Clarke

It is the whole modern concept of love which should be re-examined, such as is commonly but transparently expressed in phrases like 'love at first sight' and 'honeymoon'. All this shoddy terminology is on top of that tainted with the most reactionary irony. — 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

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

In this part of Canada, it was assumed that the passengers would provide each other with entertainment. — Beatrice Rose Roberts

I once owned a home on an island off the coast of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. — Joseph Monninger

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

I never knew I was a surrealist till Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was. — Frida Kahlo

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

Courbet comes in 1849 with the intention of overthrowing past art and constructing it anew. While he speaks only of realism, of which he proclaims himself the messiah, his pictures show pre-eminently those qualities which are learned in the museums. — Jules Breton

Smile for the camera, pretty little Sydney Tar Ponds. — Rebecca McNutt