Salvador Dalí > Quotes

“Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.”
― Salvador Dalí

“I don't do drugs. I am drugs.”
― Salvador Dalí

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”
― Salvador Dalí

“An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.”
― Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali

“Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali.”
― Salvador Dalí

“What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.”
― Salvador Dalí

“A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.”
― Salvador Dalí

“The only difference between me and a madman is I'm not mad.”
― Salvador Dalí

“Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a mustache - it is better for the health.
However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: "Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?"
Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of mustaches.”
― Salvador Dalí, Dalí's Mustache

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
― Salvador Dalí

“Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic”
― Salvador Dalí

“There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.”
― Salvador Dalí

“The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”
― Salvador Dalí

“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.”
― Salvador Dalí

“The difference between false memories and true ones is the
same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the
most real, the most brilliant.”
― Salvador Dalí

“One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.”
― Salvador Dalí

“Beauty should be edible, or not at all.”
― Salvador Dalí

“The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.”
― Salvador Dalí

“Let my enemies devour each other”
― Salvador Dalí

“Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: It is either good or bad. ”
― Salvador Dalí

“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.”
― Salvador Dalí

“It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.”
― Salvador Dalí

“So little of what could happen does happen.”
― Salvador Dalí

“The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.”
― Salvador Dalí

“I am not strange. I am just not normal.”
― Salvador Dalí

“Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.”
― Salvador Dalí

“Forever will be you and me.”
― Salvador Dalí

“What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.”
― Salvador Dalí

“Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.”
― Salvador Dalí

“People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.”
― Salvador Dalí

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
― Salvador Dalí

“This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.”
― Salvador Dalí

“You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life”
― Salvador Dalí

“Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!”
― Salvador Dalí

“It's better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week.”
― Salvador Dalí

“We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.”
― Salvador Dalí

“I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.”
― Salvador Dalí

“I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I'm never served a cooked telephone.”
― Salvador Dalí

“Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.”
― Salvador Dalí

“In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.”
― Salvador Dalí

“I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties...”
― Salvador Dalí, Hidden Faces

“Those who do not want the imitate anything, produce nothing.”
― Salvador Dalí

“When I paint, the Sea Roars
Others Splash about in the bath”
― Salvador Dalí

“I do not take drugs. I am drugs.”
― Salvador Dalí

“I believe that the moment is near when
by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.”
― Salvador Dalí

“New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that "promised land" which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian "planetary notions." Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the "antediluvian" bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on each side of me as I passed, like two rows of organ-pipes of angelic flesh with cowrie-shell sea vulvas.”
― Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí

“Que hablen de uno, aunque sea bien”
― Salvador Dalí

“لا تناقش غبياً لأن الناس لن تعرف أيكما الغبي”
― Salvador Dalí

“El amor, dije yo, se parecía extrañamente a ciertas sensaciones gástricas de los primeros síntomas del mareo, que producían una inquietud y estremecimientos tan delicados que uno no estaba seguro de si estaba enamorado o iba a vomitar.”
― Salvador Dalí

“Nuestra época se muere de escepticismo moral y nulidad espiritual. La pereza imaginativa, al entregarse al seudoprogreso mecánico, momentáneo y material del período de posguerra, ha desjerarquizado el espíritu. Lo ha desarmado, deshonrado ante la muerte y la eternidad. La civilización mecánica será destruida por la guerra. La máquina está destinada a derrumbarse y enmohecerse, atascada en los campos de batalla, y las jóvenes y enérgicas masas que la construyeron están condenadas a servir de carne de cañón.”
― Salvador Dalí