André Breton Quotes



Best 24 Other Quotes by André Breton

“A word and everything is saved. A word and all is lost.”

“A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.”

“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.”

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

“I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call; where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic; where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later be etched by a diamond.”

“It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture ? a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!”

“Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.”

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

“Living and ceasing to live are imaginary solutions; existence is elsewhere.”

“May night continue to fall upon the orchestra.”

“Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.”

“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?”

“Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.”

“Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.”

“Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.”

“The imaginary is what tends to become real.”

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“It’s better to bet on this life than on the next.”


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“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.”

“The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream', the increasing use of which – among others in the domain of the cinema – has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion.”

“The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Words make love with one another.”

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“An object never serves the same function as its image – or its name.”


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