André Breton Quotes

Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all.

I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.

Les valeurs oniriques l'ont définitivement emporté sur les autres et je demande à ce qu'on tienne pour un crétin celui qui se refuserait encore, par exemple, à voir un cheval galoper sur une tomate. Une tomate est aussi un ballon d'enfant, le surréalisme, je le répète, ayant supprimé le mot comme.

Surrealism is only trying to rejoin the most durable traditions of mankind. Among the primitive peoples art always goes beyond what is conventionally and arbitrarily called the 'real'. The natives of the Northwest Pacific coast, the Pueblos, New Guinea, New Ireland, the Marquesas, among others, have made 'objets' [in the Collections of Max Ernst, C. Levy-Strauss, Andre Breton, Pierre Matisse, Carlbach, Segredakis] which Surrealists particularly appreciate.

[T]his cancer of the mind which consists of thinking all too sadly that certain things 'are' while others, which well might be, 'are not'.

Why should I not expect from the sign of the dream more than I expect from a degree of consciousness which is daily more acute? Can’t the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life? Are these questions the same in one case as in the other and, in the dream, do these questions already exist? Is the dream any less restrictive or punitive than the rest? I am growing old and, more than that reality to which I believe I subject myself, it is perhaps the dream, the difference with which I treat the dream, which makes me grow old.

I say that the eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror – even if the water of that mirror offers some interesting peculiarities.. ..that eye impresses me as no less dead than the eye of a slaughtered steer if it has only the capacity to reflect – what if it reflects the object in one or in many aspects, in repose or in motion, in waking or in dream? The treasure of the eye is elsewhere! Most artists are still for tuning around the hands of the clock.. ..without having the slightest concern for the spring hidden in the opaque case. The eye-spring.. ..Arshile Gorky – for me the first painter to whom the secret have been completely revealed.

L'œil existe à l'état sauvage.

Oneiric values have definitely won out over the others, and I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like."

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. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality.