Andre Breton Quotes - Page 3

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• What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find.

  Andre Breton

  Secret, Oneself

  8 Copy quote

• For me, the single word "God" suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque.

  Andre Breton

  God, Religious, Shady

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• 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.

  Andre Breton

  Beautiful, Heart, Doe

  12 Copy quote

• I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.

  Andre Breton

  Book, Keys, Doors

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• The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level.

  Andre Breton

  Hands, Levels, Crowds

  "Not Numb" by Madeleine Watts, logger.believermag.com. March 25, 2016.

  5 Copy quote

• The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.

  Andre Breton

  Stars, Night, Clouds

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• No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.

  Andre Breton

  Example, Vain, Appeals

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Andre Breton

  Beautiful, Opposites, Trials

  Andre Breton, Mark Polizzotti (1997). “Anthology of Black Humor”, p.335, City Lights Books

  6 Copy quote

• I find it impossible to think of a picture save as a window, and my first concern about a window is to find out what it looks out on... and there is nothing I love so much as something which stretches away from me out of sight.

  Andre Breton

  Thinking, Sight, Looks

  12 Copy quote

• Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

  Andre Breton

  Beauty

  Nadja (1926)

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Andre Breton

  Loving You, Secret, Fusion

  9 Copy quote

• No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.

  Andre Breton

  Life, Feelings, Enlightenment

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• It will in the end, be admitted that everything, in effect is an image and that the least object which has no symbolic role assigned to it is capable of standing for absolutely anything.

  Andre Breton

  Roles, Ends, Symbolic

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• To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery --even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness --is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.

  Andre Breton

  Betrayal, Mean, Justice

  13 Copy quote

• We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.

  Andre Breton

  Men, Color, Sky

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• The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.

  Andre Breton

  Hands, Crowds, Pistols

  21 Copy quote

• Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.

  Andre Breton

  Art, Wall, Desire

  129 Copy quote

• I believe in the pure Surrealist joy of the man who, forewarned that all others before him have failed, refused to admit defeat, sets off from watever point he chooses, along any other pat save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can.

  Andre Breton

  Believe, Men, Joy

  8 Copy quote

• Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do; like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts.

  Andre Breton

  Believe, Men, Drug

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• 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.

  Andre Breton

  Men, People, Trying

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• Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.

  Andre Breton

  Children, Wife, Mistress

  26 Copy quote

• 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?

  Andre Breton

  Fate, Unique, Men

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• Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.

  Andre Breton

  Beautiful, Facts, Marvelous

  "Manifestoes of Surrealism". Book by André Breton, 1969.

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• Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins.

  Andre Breton

  Memories, Love You, Hands

  "First Manifesto of Surrealism". Book by Andre Breton, 1924.

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• 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.

  Andre Breton

  Light, Sun, Poor

  Andre Breton, Mark Polizzotti (1997). “Anthology of Black Humor”, p.347, City Lights Books

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