Andre Breton Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

  Andre Breton

  Mean, Psychics, Moral

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

  39 Copy quote

• I am the soul in limbo.

  Andre Breton

  Soul, Limbo

  17 Copy quote

• The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.

  Andre Breton

  Childhood, Mind, Burning

  35 Copy quote

• Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principle problems of life.

  Andre Breton

  Dream, Reality, Psychics

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

  7 Copy quote

• Trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur.

  Andre Breton

  Trust, Character, Awareness

  29 Copy quote

• It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.

  Andre Breton

  Existence, Surrealism, Elsewhere

  9 Copy quote

• Words make love with one another.

  Andre Breton

  Making Love

  18 Copy quote

• To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

  Andre Breton

  Mean

  6 Copy quote

• To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!

  Andre Breton

  God, Thinking, Atheism

  30 Copy quote

• If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.

  Andre Breton

  Love, Affair, Desperate

  15 Copy quote

• 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.

  Andre Breton

  Children, Mind, Adults

  Andre Breton, Mark Polizzotti (1997). “Anthology of Black Humor”, p.104, City Lights Books

  11 Copy quote

• Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

  Andre Breton

  Fate, Finding Yourself, Trying

  7 Copy quote

• What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

  Andre Breton

  Real, Fantastic, Surrealism

  18 Copy quote

• The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.

  Andre Breton

  Gun, Hands, Cynicism

  36 Copy quote

• May night continue to fall upon the orchestra

  Andre Breton

  Fall, Night, Orchestra

  5 Copy quote

• 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

• When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?

  Andre Breton

  Ideas, Arbitrary, Granted

  7 Copy quote

• I love you on the surface of seas Red like the egg when it is green

  Andre Breton

  Love You, Sea, Eggs

  8 Copy quote

• There is no use being alive if one must work. 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.

  Andre Breton

  Events, Use, Alive

  17 Copy quote

• The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.

  Andre Breton

  Expectations, Confusion, Challenges

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Andre Breton

  Men, Reflection, Identity

  Andre Breton, Mark Polizzotti (1997). “Anthology of Black Humor”, p.329, City Lights Books

  7 Copy quote

• The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

  Andre Breton

  Photography, Writing, Artist

  18 Copy quote

• The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly

  Andre Breton

  Gun, Crowds, Surrealist

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Andre Breton

  Silly, Eye, Names

  9 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

  7 Copy quote

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