Quotes & Sayings About Magritte

I thought of a high school report I did on the Belgian artist Rene Magritte and a quote I once read from him, something about his favorite walk being the one he took around his own bedroom. He said that he never understood the need for people to travel because all the poetry and perspective you're ever going to get you already posses. Anais Nin had the same idea. We see the world as we are. So if it's the same brain we bring with us every time we open our eyes, what's the difference if we're looking at an island cove or a pocket watch? — Sloane Crosley

We are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all. — Rene Magritte

Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible. — Rene Magritte

If I indulge myself and surrender to memory, I can still feel the knot of excitement that gripped me as I turned the corner into Rue Mimosas, looking for the house of Rene Magritte. It was August, 1965. I was 33 years old and about to meet the man whose profound and witty surrealist paintings had contradicted my assumptions about photography. — Duane Michals

I do not like money, either for itself or for what it can buy, since I want nothing we know about. — Rene Magritte

An object never serves the same function as its image - or its name. — Rene Magritte

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well ... — Rene Magritte

Those who become entangled in these false ideas are prevented from perceiving the Integral Oneness. — Rene Magritte

A truly poetic canvas is an awakened dream. — Rene Magritte

An object is not so attached to its name that we cannot find another one that would suit it better. — Rene Magritte

To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been. — Rene Magritte

I think we are responsible for the universe, but that doesn't mean we decide anything. — Rene Magritte

If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised. — Rene Magritte

After Magritte often serves as a companion piece to The Real Inspector Hound, which I think is appropriate in at least one way: neither play is about anything grander than itself. A — Tom Stoppard

Too often we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar. I intend to restore the familiar to the strange. — Rene Magritte

As regards the artists themselves, most of them gave up their freedom quite lightly, placing their art at the service of someone or something. As a rule, their concerns and their ambitions are those of any old careerist. I thus acquired a total distrust of art and artists, whether they were officially recognised or were endeavouring to become so, and I felt that I had nothing in common with this guild. I had a point of reference which held me elsewhere, namely that magic within art which I had encountered as a child. — Rene Magritte

The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown. — Rene Magritte

My eyes roved over the walls covered with my collages and prints of famous paintings. Magritte, Kandinsky, Kahlo. My origami shapes hung from fishing wire, dangling over my bed. They shivered in the slight breeze blowing through my open window. It was my own little escape pod, but none of it was enough tonight. — Heather Demetrios

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying! — Rene Magritte

Everyday objects shriek aloud. — Rene Magritte

People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images. — Rene Magritte

The purpose of art is mystery. — Rene Magritte

Each thing we see hides something else we want to see. — Rene Magritte

I have few illusions: the cause is lost in advance. As for me, I do my part, which is to drag a fairly drab existence to its conclusion. — Rene Magritte

Tom Stoppard's other work includes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, After Magritte, The Real Thing, Enter A Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink (a stage adaptation of his own play, In the Native State) and The Invention of Love. Arcadia — Tom Stoppard

My painting is visible images that conceal nothing ... they evoke mystery. Mystery means nothing. It is unknowable. — Rene Magritte

That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is. — Amy Reed

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day. — Joseph O'Neill

No object is stuck with its name so irrevocably that one cannot find another which suits it better. — Rene Magritte

What he imagines evokes nothing imaginary, it evokes the reality of the world that experience and reason treat in a confused manner. — Rene Magritte

Nothing is confused except the mind. — Rene Magritte

I like Dali and Magritte. I also like the Scottish artist John Byrne, another surrealist. — Billy Connolly

Painting bores me like everything else. Unfortunately, painting is one of the activities - it is bound up in the series of activities - that seems to change almost nothing in life, the same habits are always recurring. — Rene Magritte

I feel like I swallowed a Magritte. Like on the inside, I'm made of clouds and floating eyes, green apples, and slowly rising men in bowler hats. — Libba Bray

My investigations resembled the pursuit of the solution to a problem for which I had three data: the object, the thing connected with it in the shadow of my consciousness, and the light wherein that thing would become apparent. — Rene Magritte

I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street. — Rene Magritte

We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world. — Rene Magritte

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

I despise my own past and that of others. I despise resignation, patience, professional heroism and all the obligatory sentiments. I also despise the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, radio announcers' voices, aerodynamics, the Boy Scouts, the smell of naphtha, the news, and drunks.
I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street.
I hope for vibrant love, the impossible, the chimerical.
I dread knowing precisely my own limitations. — Rene Magritte

All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning
not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf. — Michel Foucault

The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb. — Rene Magritte

I want nevertheless to add that for me the world is a defiance of common sense. — Rene Magritte

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist — Rene Magritte

This is not a pipe. — Rene Magritte

The feeling we experience while we look at a picture is not to be distinguished from the picture or from ourselves. the feeling, picture, and ourselves are united in one mystery. — Rene Magritte

I need to see the original paintings just as little as I have to read the original manuscripts of books. — Rene Magritte

Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it. — Rene Magritte

Life obliges me to do something, so I paint. — Rene Magritte

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing ... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable. — Rene Magritte

It is not my intention to make anything comprehensible. I am of the opinion that there are sufficient paintings which one understands after a shorter or longer delay, and that therefore some incomprehensible painting would now be welcome. I am at pains to deliver such, as far as possible. — Rene Magritte

Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life. — Rene Magritte

He is no longer the pretext for a story: the story itself renders him homage. The works of Fantomas can neither be destroyed nor accept modifications ... Fantomas requires more of others than of himself ... He is never completely invisible. His likeness can be seen through his face ... Fantomas's science is more precious than the word. It is not possible to guess it - and no one can doubt its power. — Rene Magritte

Do not accept any explanation of the world either through chance or determinism. You are not responsible for your belief. It is not even you who decides that you are not responsible - and so on to infinity. You are not obliged to believe. There is no point of departure. — Rene Magritte

Anyway, for whatever interest is to be derived therefrom. Bacon, Balthus, and Magritte are my three favourite painters, along with Dubuffet, of the whole post-impressionist period, by which I mean that before them Bonnard, Vuillard, & Seurat are my favourite painters of that time. — Edward Gorey

A thing which is present can be invisible, hidden by what it shows — Rene Magritte

I detest my past, and anyone else's. I detest resignation, patience, professional heroism and obligatory beautiful feelings. I also detest the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, voices making announcements, aerodynamism, boy scouts, the smell of moth balls, events of the moment, and drunken people. — Rene Magritte

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream. — Rene Magritte