Andre Breton Quotes

Be careful: everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us…

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

At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.

(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.

I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers, the way I surrender myself to those who read me with eyes wide open; in order to stop imposing, in this realm, the conscious rhythm of my thought.

Because of the earth's roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the "authors of our days" – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don't agree?

They rarely discovered a star red as a distant crime or a star-fish.

Beauty will be convulsive or not at all.

Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.

Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, whether verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, free from any control by the reason, independent of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.

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!

Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.

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

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.

It is impossible for me to envisage a picture as being other than a window, and why my first concern is then to know what it looks out on.

It was really a star, a star you were heading toward. You can't fail to reach it. Hearing you speak, I felt that nothing would hold you back, nothing, not even me. . . . You could never see this star as I do. You don't understand: It's like the heart of a heartless flower.

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.

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

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

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

If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.

Man proposes and dispose. He and he alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy.

A woman's hand, your hand in its starry paleness only to help you walk downstairs, refracts its beam into my own. Its slightest touch branches out inside me and in a moment will trace above us those delicate canopies where the inverted sky stirs its blue leaves with misty aspen or willow. As for me, to what do I actually owe this remission of a pain that so many others suffer because of less guilt than I feel today? Before I met you I'd known misfortune, despair. Before I met you, come on, those words mean nothing. You know very well that when I first laid eyes on you I recognized you without the slightest hesitation. And from what borders did you come, so fearfully protected against everyone, what initiation to which no one or almost no one was admitted has consecrated what you are.

How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise.

The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.

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

The eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror ... if it has only the capacity to reflect.

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.

The imaginary is what tends to become real.

When the windows like the jackal's eye and desire pierce the dawn, silken windlasses lift me up to suburban footbridges. I summon a girl who is dreaming in the little gilded house; she meets me on the piles of black moss and offers me her lips which are stones in the rapid river depths. Veiled forebodings descend the buildings' steps. The best thing is to flee from the great feather cylinders when the hunters limp into the sodden lands. If you take a bath in the watery patterns of the streets, childhood returns to the country like a greyhound. Man seeks his prey in the breezes and the fruits are drying on the screens of pink paper, in the shadow of the names overgrown by forgetfulness. Joys and sorrows spread in the town. Gold and eucalyptus, similarly scented, attack dreams. Among the bridles and the dark edelweiss subterranean forms are resting like perfumers' corks.

Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.

Birds will be bored
If I'd forgotten something
Ring the bells of those school dismissals in the sea
What we shall call pensive borage
We start by giving the solution to the contest
To wit how many tears can be held in a woman's hand
1. as little as possible
2. in a medium-sized hand
While I crumple this star-lit paper
And while the everlasting flesh has once and for all taken
possession of the mountain summits
I live like a recluse in a little house in the Vaucluse
Heart king's order

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

Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.

We are in front of a fountain, whose jet she seems to be watching. 'Those are your thoughts and mine. Look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it's still prettier when they fall back. And then they dissolve immediately, driven back up with the same strength, then there's that broken spurt again, that fall ... and so on indefinitely.

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.

We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.

With the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.

I wish I could change my sex as easily as I can change my shirt.

I am the soul in limbo.

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

Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.

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.

L'union libre [Freedom of Love]"

My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley

People despair of love stupidly – I have despaired of it myself - they live in servitude to this idea that love is always behind them, never before them: bygone years, lies about forgetting after twenty years. They can bear to admit – and force themselves to – that love is not for them, with its procession of clarities, with this look it casts upon the world from all the eyes of diviners. They are limping with fallacious memories, for which they even invent the origin of an immemorial fall, so as not to find themselves too guilty. And yet for each, the promise of each coming hour contains life's whole life secret, perhaps about to be revealed one day, possibly in another being.

The imaginary is that which tends to become real.

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

It is the whole modern concept of love which should be re-examined, such as is commonly but transparently expressed in phrases like 'love at first sight' and 'honeymoon'. All this shoddy terminology is on top of that tainted with the most reactionary irony.

It will in the end, be admitted that everything, in effect is an image and that the least object which has no symbolic role assigned to it is capable of standing for absolutely anything.

Intellectually, true beauty is very difficult to distinguish a priori from the bloom of youth.

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.

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

Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory.

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

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

Trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur.

The truth can only be seen when you close your eyes to reason and surrender yourself to dreams.

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.

I will be like Nijinksi, who was taken last year to the Russian ballet, and could not comprehend what spectacle he was viewing. I will be alone, quite alone in myself, indifferent to all the world's ballets.

What's the good of these great fragile fits of enthusiasm, these jaded jumps of joys? We know nothing anymore, but the dead stars; we gaze at their faces; and we gasp with pleasure. Our mouths are dry as the lost beaches, and our eyes turn aimlessly and without hope. Now all that remain are these cafés where we meet to drink these cool drinks, these diluted spirits, and the tables are stickier than the pavements where our shadows of the day before have fallen.

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.

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

The mere word freedom is the only one that still excites me. I deem it capable of indefinitely sustaining the old human fanaticism. It doubtless satisfies my only legitimate aspiration. Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought. It is up to us not to misuse it. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery-even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness-is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself.

Even that great poverty which had been and remains mine let up for a few days. I was not, as it happens, opposed to this poverty: I accepted to pay the price for not being a slave to life, to settle for the right I had assumed once and for all to not express any ideas but my own. We were not many in doing this ... Poverty passed by in the distance, made lovelier and almost justified, a little like what has been called, in the case of a painter who was one of your first friends, the blue period. It seemed the almost inevitable consequence of my refusal to behave the way almost all the others did, whether on one side or another. This poverty, whether you had the time to dread it or not, imagine it was only the other side of the miraculous coin of your existence: the Night of the Sunflower would have been less radiant without it.

One can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence.

Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do; like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts.

My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.

May night continue to fall upon the orchestra

Tell me whom you haunt and I'll tell you who you are.

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.

In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.

Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does ... The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph ... Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.

Without you what shall I do with my abiding love of genius, in whose name I have at least been able to attempt a few acknowledgments here and there? I flatter myself I know where genius is, almost what it consists of, and I held it capable of conciliating all the other great passions with itself. I believe blindly in your genius. Reluctantly, sadly, I withdraw this word, if it shocks you. But in that case, I prefer to banish it altogether. Genius ... what could I still expect from the few possible intercessors who have appeared to me under this sign, and which, at your side, I have ceased to possess!

Without doing it on purpose, you have taken the place of forms most familiar to me, as well as several figures of my foreboding.

All I know is that this substitution of persons stops with you, because [and this is my favorite part!] nothing can be substituted for you, and because for me it was for all eternity that this succession of terrible or charming enigmas was to come to an end at your feet.

You are not an enigma for me.
I say that you have turned me from engimas forever.
Since you exist, as you alone know how to exist ..

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.

The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.

Let us not mince words: The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beauitful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful

All my life my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. andre breton

The idea of love walked along the water and her gaze was full of absence and her eyes spat lighting. The impressionable evening received by turns the imprints of grasses, clouds, bodies, and wore crazy astronomical designs. The idea of love walked straight ahead without seeing anything; she was wearing tiny isosceles mirrors whose perfect assemblage was amazing. They were so many images of fish tails, when, by their angelic nature, they answer the promise one might make of always finding each other again. Finding each other again even in the depths of a forest, where the thread of a star is an articulation more silent than life, the dawn a liquor stronger than blood. Who is lost, who truly wanders off when a cup of coffee is steaming in the fog and waiters dressed in snow circulate patiently on the surface of floors whose desired height can be indicated with one's hands? Who? A solitary man whom the idea of love has just left and who tucks in his spirit like an imaginary bed. The man falls all the same and in the next room, under the moon-white verandah, a woman rises whom the idea of love has abandoned. The gravel weeps outside, a rain of glass is falling in which we recognize small chains, tears in which we have time to see ourselves, mirror tears, shards of windows, singular crystals like the ones we witness in our hand on awakening, leaves and the faded petals of those roses that once embelished certain distillery bottles. It's just that the idea of love, it seems angry w

I do not admire Flaubert, yet when I am told that by his own admission all he hoped to accomplish in in Salammbo was to 'give the impression of the color yellow' and in Madame Bovary 'to do something that would have the color of those mouldy cornices that harbor wood lice' and that he cared for nothing else, such generally extra-literary preoccupations leave me anything but indifferent.

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

I find it impossible to think of a picture save as a window, and my first concern about a window is to find out what it looks out on ... and there is nothing I love so much as something which stretches away from me out of sight.

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

Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?

This is the most beautiful night of all, the lightning filled night: day, compared to it, is night.

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.

I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the 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 appear etched by a diamond.

The double eyelid of the sun rises and falls on life. The birds' feet on the windowpane of the sky are what I used to call stars. The earth itself, whose motion seems so inexplicable as long as one remains beneath the vault, the earth that is webfooted with deserts is itself subject to the laws of migration

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

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

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!

The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros's work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.

Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.

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.