André Breton > Quotes

“My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.”
― André Breton, What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings

“Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.”
― André Breton

“Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.”
― André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor

“My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire”
― André Breton, Poems

“The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.”
― André Breton

“Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does...The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph...Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”
― André Breton, Nadja

“The imaginary is what tends to become real.”
― André Breton

“The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.”
― André Breton, The Magnetic Fields

“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.”
― André Breton

“The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows”
― André 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.”
― André Breton

“with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.”
― André Breton

“
Words make love with one another.”
― André Breton

“A game: say something. Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Like this (she closes her eyes): Two, two what? Two women. What do they look like? Wearing black. Where are they? In a park. . . . And then, what are they doing? Try it, it's so easy, why don't you want to play? You know, that's how I talk to myself when I'm alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only silly stories: actually, I live this way altogether.”
― André Breton, Nadja

“Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.”
― André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor

“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.”
― André Breton

“May night continue to fall upon the orchestra”
― André Breton

“Let us not mince words.. the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.”
― André Breton

“The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly”
― André Breton

“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”
― André Breton

“Un mot et tout est perdu, un mot et tout est sauvé.”
― André Breton

“At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.”
― André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor

“We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.”
― André Breton, The Magnetic Fields

“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.”
― André Breton

“What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.”
― André Breton

“The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.”
― André Breton

“I love you on the surface of seas
Red like the egg when it is green
”
― André Breton

“Over and above the various prejudices I acknowledge, the affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur to me and to me alone- over and above a sum of movements I am conscious of making, of emotions I alone experience- I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognize what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate?”
― André Breton

“The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream", the increasing use of which - among others in the domain of the cinema - has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion.”
― André Breton

“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!”
― André Breton

“Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.”
― André Breton

“Living and ceasing to live are imaginary solutions; existence is elsewhere.”
― André Breton

“They rarely discovered a star red as a distant crime or a star-fish.”
― André Breton, The Magnetic Fields

“It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms.”
― André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor

“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.”
― André Breton, Nadja

“All my life my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.” andre breton”
― André Breton

“(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.”
― André Breton

“Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.”
― André Breton

“I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.”
― André 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. ”
― André Breton, L'Amour fou

“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 …”
― André Breton, Mad Love

“(...) Sí, por las tardes, hacia las siete, le gusta encontrarse en un vagón de segunda mano del metro. La mayoría de los pasajeros son personas que regresan de sus trabajos. Se sienta entre ellos, trata de sorprender en sus caras el motivo de sus preocupaciones. Naturalmente, están pensando en lo que acaban de abandonar hasta mañana, sólo hasta mañana, y también en lo que les espera esta noche, lo cual les alegra o les preocupa aún más. Nadja se queda mirando fijamente algo definido: «Hay buenas personas». Más alterado de lo que quisiera mostrarme, ahora sí me enojo: «Pues no. Además tampoco se trata de eso. El hecho de que soporten el trabajo, con o sin las demás miserias, impide que esas personas sean interesantes. Si la rebeldía no es lo más fuerte que sienten, ¿cómo podrían aumentar su dignidad sólo con eso? En esos momentos, por lo demás, usted les ve; ellos ni siquiera la ven a usted. Por lo que a mí se refiere, yo odio, con todas mis fuerzas, esa esclavitud que pretenden que considere encomiable. Compadezco al hombre por estar condenado a ella, porque por lo general no puede evitarla, pero si me pongo de su parte no es por la dureza de su condena, es y no podría ser más que por la energía de su protesta. Yo sé que en el horno de la fábrica, o delante de esas máquinas inexorables que durante todo el día imponen la repetición del mismo gesto, con intervalos de algunos segundos, o en cualquier otro lugar bajo las órdenes más inaceptables, o en una celda, o ante un pelotón de ejecución, todavía puede uno sentirse libre, pero no es el martirio que se padece lo que crea esa libertad. Admito que esa libertad sea un perpetuo librarse de las cadenas: será preciso, por añadidura, para que ese desencadenarse sea posible, constantemente posible, que las cadenas no nos aplasten, como les ocurre a muchos de los que usted me habla. Pero también es, y quizá mucho más desde el punto de vista humano, la mayor o menor pero, en cualquier caso, la maravillosa sucesión de pasos que le es dado al hombre hacer sin cadenas. Esos pasos, ¿les considera usted capaces de darlos? ¿Tienen tiempo de darlos, al menos? ¿Tienen el valor de darlos? Buenas personas, decía usted, sí, tan buenas como las que se dejaron matar en la guerra, ¿verdad? Digamos claro lo que son los héroes: un montón de desgraciados y algunos pobres imbéciles. Para mí, debo confesarlo, esos pasos lo son todo. Hacia dónde se encaminan, ésa es la verdadera pregunta. De algún modo, acabarán trazando un camino y, en ese camino, ¿quién sabe si no surgirá la manera de quitar las cadenas o de ayudar a desencadenarse a los que se han quedado en el camino? Sólo entonces será conveniente detenerse un poco, sin que ello suponga desandar lo andado». (Bastante a las claras se ve lo que puedo decir al respecto, sobre todo a poco que decida tratarlo de manera concreta.) Nadja me escucha y no intenta contradecirme. Tal vez lo último que ella haya querido hacer sea la apología del trabajo.”
― André Breton, Nadja

“There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.”
― André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism

“Partir pour le pôle intérieur de soi-même.”
― André Breton

“How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise.”
― André Breton, The Magnetic Fields

“Because of the earth’s roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the “authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?”
― André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor

“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.”
― André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism

“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.”
― André Breton

“Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.”
― André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism

“I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.”
― André Breton