A biography for Rene Magrittehasn’t been written yet.
“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.”
“To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.”
“Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it.”
“My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.”
“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.”
“Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.”
“We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world.”
“The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb.”
“The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.”
“If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.”