Surrealist Artist Quotes & Sayings

For Desire, who is male and female, fair and dark, old and young, anything and everything you have ever wished for, or coveted, or needed, is irresistible. And so what would be the point, after all? Love is not a game to Desire, as it is to so many mortals, or if it is, it is a game with a foregone conclusion: Desire always wins. And Desire hates more than anything to be bored. — Lisa Goldstein

Why are we all only like mortal pieces of furniture? Why is nothing important? — D.H. Lawrence

Logic, order, truth, reason, we consign them all to the oblivion of death," said one Surrealist manifesto. We must "cultivate the hatred of intelligence," said the leader of the Futurists, Filippo Marinetti, an artist hailed by Mussolini as the John the Baptist of Fascism.17 — Leonard Peikoff

His being there was stirring up a lot of memories she'd have been happier to leave as sentimental sediment. Not that they weren't good memories. That was the trouble. — Diana Killian

The partisan strife in which the people of the country are permitted to periodically engage does not tend to the development of ugly traits of character, but merely discloses those that preexist. — Ambrose Bierce

Those men are most apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad, who are under the discipline of shrews at home. — Washington Irving

My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of 'The Violation' by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know, Brigid Marlin, to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women. — J.G. Ballard

If you love and serve man, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape remuneration. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

It didn't take elaborate experiments to deduce that an infant would die from want of food. But it took centuries to figure out that infants can and do perish from want of love. — Louise J. Kaplan

I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction.
Dear old Dad, in contrast, still pours his wine into the same decaying old wineskins, he still believes in a constitution when nothing and no one constitutes anything. — Ernst Junger

To me, it's a structural flaw of the faith that its adherents are forbidden from challenging the leader (and its policies) at all costs. And right behind the current leader is another of the same kind. — Leah Remini

Photography is a transformation, not a reproduction. — Ernst Haas

The song Dakota was first written in Paris. I was doing a promo trip. It was snowing and the hotel room was really cold and boring and for some reason I just had a go of the guitar and the song came pretty quick. — Kelly Jones

Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love; it has forever cursed and expelled and crucified the one passion which sweetens and smiles on human life, which makes the desert blossom as the rose, and which glorifies the common things and common ways of earth. It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin and darkness ... Even in the unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely to exist for the mere necessity of procreation. — Ouida

[Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]
Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too. — Audrey Niffenegger

Most artists are surrealists — Dong Kingman

All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part. — Henry Moore

the pity which the spectators then exhibit is in so far a consolation for the weak and suffering in that the latter recognize therein that they possess still one power , in spite of their weakness, the power of giving pain. The unfortunate derives a sort of pleasure from this feeling of superiority, of which the exhibition of pity makes him conscious; his imagination is exalted, he is still powerful enough to give the world pain. Thus the thirst for pity is the thirst for self-gratification, and that, moreover, at the expense of his fellow-men; it shows man in the whole inconsiderateness of his own dear self, but — Friedrich Nietzsche