Andre Breton

“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.”

“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.”

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

“I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.”

“There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.”

“Words make love with one another.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.”

“Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.”

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

“Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.”

“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.”

“Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.”

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