Surrealism Quotes

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

“Exit, pursued by a bear.”
― William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

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

“Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all”
― Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, The Nose

“This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death.”
― Rene Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking

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

“L'union libre [Freedom of Love]"

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”
― Andre Breton, Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology

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

“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”
― Marcel Duchamp

“As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”
― Lautreamont

“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

“Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.”
― Jyrki Vainonen

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

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

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

“I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.”
― Arthur Holitscher

“I am the soul in limbo.”
― Andre Breton, Nadja

“I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. ”
― Joan Miro

“Somewhere there are gardens where peacocks sing like nightingales, somewhere there are caravans of separated lovers traveling to meet each other; there are ruby fires on distant mountains, and blue comets that come in spring like sapphires in the black sky. If this is not so, meet me in the shameful yard, and we will plant a gallows tree, and swing like sad pendulums, never once touching.”
― K.J. Bishop, The Etched City

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

“Now the night's breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks.”
― Joe Bousquet

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

“Gregor’s serious wound, from which he suffered for over a month - the apple remained imbedded in his flesh as a visible souvenir since no one dared to remove it - seemed to have reminded even his father that Gregor was a member of the family, in spite of his present pathetic and repulsive shape, who could not be treated as an enemy; that, on the contrary, it was the commandment of the family duty to swallow their disgust and endure him, endure him and nothing more.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“An immense body, encircling my delirium, a body made of wind and sunlight, crouching and stretching, encompassed the existence of the slightest human echo.
”
― Joe Bousquet

“A constant human error: to believe in an end to one's fantasies. Our daydreams are the measure of our unreachable truth. The secret of all things lies in the emptiness of the formula that guard them.”
― Floriano Martins

“I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“I gazed upon the earth and saw that a body, in its tender faithlessness, had located it in the sky. A splendid scarf of blood, looming above the abyss.”
― Joe Bousquet

“Iff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called 'hunger artists' — 'Because when they are hungry they swallow stories through every mouth, and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another, and hey presto, when they spew the stories out they are not the old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old — it is the new combinations that make them new.”
― Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

“Surrealism, then, neither aims to subvert realism, as does the fantastic, nor does it try to transcend it. It looks for different means by which to explore reality itself.”
― Michael Richardson, Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World

“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, Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World