Surrealists Quotes & Sayings

Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes. — Dave Barry

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai. — J.G. Ballard

I think our skin clears up and we're nicer when you are in love. — Nia Vardalos

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That's lost. We know how to read every promise in faces-the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry. — Ivan Chtcheglov

An image of Luc's face flashed on my screen, his finger waggling. "Time to go outside!" it said. "Time to go outside!" I tried to silence it, reduce the volume, and turn off the phone, but to no avail. Luc had definitely created a reminder for our outdoor guarding duties - and there was no way to turn it off. I grimaced at the phone and showed it to Ethan. "We have a monster on our hands. — Chloe Neill

I was a young boy when I met the Surrealists and the Dadaists. I admired them, and that is what they taught me: to admire. Admiration is very important. People who are unable to admire others lose an important part of their soul. My soul developed from a very early age through encounters with admired people. — Stephane Hessel

Not to say that the process assumes anything of "greater" or "lesser" importance, though: it's just more graphic information. Take the surrealists, for example, or a work by Cage. For me, there's a great value in doing this with literature. There's a certain form of dependence; process and product inform each other, depend on each other. I consider myself a writer who doesn't write with a style, almost. I begin with tension, with a vibe, a character. — Sergio Chejfec

You see, without hard work and responsibility, there is no American Dream. Hard work lays the foundation. Our solidarity makes work pay - for all of us. For the greater good. That's what our vision of shared prosperity is all about. — Richard Trumka

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living. — Anais Nin

Most artists are surrealists ... always dreaming something and then they paint it. — Dong Kingman

The last hundred years have been retinal; even the cubists were. The surrealists tried to free themselves, and earlier so had the dadaists, but unfortunately, these latter were nihilists and didn't produce enough to prove their point, which, by the way, they didn't have to prove - according to their theory. — Marcel Duchamp

I learned in English class about surrealists. It was the first time I wanted to throw myself up so I could be marked present. Surrealism turns the whole world upside down. — A.S. King

The more I look at most of the art movements, it's all occultism, when you get down to it. The Surrealists were openly talking about being magicians. — Alan Moore

I would wash the dust of the world in a soft green flood. Here between sea and sea in a fairy wood, I have found a delicate wave-green solitude. — Arthur Symons

Is Jacob paying you for all the P.R., or are you a volunteer? — Stephenie Meyer

Most artists are surrealists — Dong Kingman

I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, in 1929) because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's. — Hans Arp

The real importance of automatism lay in the fact that it led to a different relation between the artist and the creative act. Where the artist had traditionally been seen as someone who invents a personal world, bringing into being something unique to his own 'genius', the surrealists conceived themselves as explorers and researchers rather than 'artist' in the traditional sense and it was discovery rather than invention that became crucial for them. — Michael Richardson

I am not a surrealist. I am only a realist. All this group - surrealists - use my name. No, no, I am realist. — Andre Kertesz

Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being. Words need to be coaxed to reveal a little of their true nature, so as to close the breach that exists between the writer and the universe. The world is not something alien against which man is in conflict. Rather man and cosmos exist in reciprocal motion. We are not cast adrift in an alien or meaningless environment. The universe is intimate with us and, as Breton insisted, it is a cryptogram to be deciphered. — Michael Richardson

The surrealists know that the surreal is in the real, just as the mage knows that the invisible is in the visible and the alchemist knows that the infinite is to be found in the finite - and the Great Work consists of its extraction. — Patrick Lepetit

The shifting sands of the world ... show how much the surrealists were drawn towards an interrogation of what reality actually is. Unlike fabulists of whatever hue, there is a materiality in surrealist writing that resolutely keeps it, one might say, 'down to earth'. — Michael Richardson

This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope. — Ayn Rand

In an age in which the classic words of the Surrealists - 'As beautiful as the unexpected meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella' - can become reality and perfectly achievable with an atom bomb, so too has there been a surge of interest in biomechanoids — H.R. Giger

They rolled all over the pastel crayons scattered on the sheets so her back was variegated with patches and blotches all the colours of the rainbow and Lee was also marked everywhere with brilliant dusts, both here and there also darkly spotted with blood, each a canvas involuntarily patterned by those workings of random chance so much prized by the surrealists. — Angela Carter

All rebel thought, as we
have seen, is expressed either in rhetoric or in a closed universe. The rhetoric of ramparts in Lucretius, the
convents and isolated castles of Sade, the island or the lonely rock of the romantics, the solitary heights of
Nietzsche, the primeval seas of Lautreamont, the parapets of Rimbaud, the terrifying castles of the
surrealists, which spring up in a storm of flowers, the prison, the nation behind barbed wire, the
concentration camps, the empire of free slaves, all illustrate, after their own fashion, the same need for
coherence and unity. In these sealed worlds, man can reign and have knowledge at last. — Albert Camus

Since Courbet, it's been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone's error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral ... our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat. — Marcel Duchamp

Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things. — Kenneth Koch

Chuck said, "Hey. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" Cawley looked over at him. "I'll bite. How many?" "Fish," Chuck said and let loose a bright bark of a laugh. — Dennis Lehane

I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds. — J.G. Ballard

Growing up I was very into art. In high school I was into the surrealists and impressionists, and I loved Klimt. In '91 or '92 I saw one of those Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled billboards. I was just really arrested by it. It was kind of my first foray into contemporary art. It was a turning point for me as to what art could be and what it meant and the impact it could have. — Chloe Sevigny

Since you think it my duty, Mr. Farebrother, I will tell you that I have too strong a feeling for Fred to give him up for any one else. I should never be quite happy if I thought he was unhappy for the loss of me. It has taken such deep root in me - my gratitude to him for always loving me best, and minding so much if I hurt myself, from the time when we were very little. I cannot imagine any new feeling coming to make that weaker. — George Eliot